This funding will impact 3,000km² of countryside, supporting conservation work, reconnecting local communities and creating new jobs and training opportunities.

Rory Stewart, Environment Minister, said: “This is wonderful news. The Heritage Lottery Fund is now playing an absolutely central role in conserving and restoring our landscape.”

Drew Bennellick, HLF Head of Landscape and Natural Heritage, added: “Landscapes are more than just beautiful scenery: they are the backdrop to some of history’s most notorious events.  What better way to mark Halloween than to look at how Pendle Hill with its bleak peat bogs and rugged heather moorland was witness to the witchcraft trials phenomenon that spread right across Lancashire in the 1600s.”

[quote=Rory Stewart, Environment Minister]"The Heritage Lottery Fund is now playing an absolutely central role in conserving and restoring our landscape.”[/quote]

The 13 areas benefiting from HLF’s investment stretch from the Orkney Isles in Scotland to Penwith’s peninsula on the south western tip of mainland England. Highlighting the extraordinary range of the UK’s natural heritage - from a World Heritage Site to Britain’s largest protected wetland, the areas are:

• Pendle Hill Landscape Partnership Scheme, Forest of Bowland, Lancashire
• Water, Mills and Marshes – The Broads Landscape Partnership, Norfolk
• ‘Our Picturesque Landscape’, Dee Valley, North East Wales
• Callander’s Pass – Mind the Gap – Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park, Scotland
• ‘Elan Links – People, Nature & Water’, Mid Wales
• ‘Living Levels’ Partnership, Gwent, South Wales
• North Isles Landscape Partnership Scheme, Orkney Islands, Scotland
• Galloway Glens Landscape Partnership, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland
• Lough Erne Landscape Partnership, Fermanagh, Northern Ireland
• ‘Nenescape: Revealing the Hidden Stories of the Nene Valley’, Northampton
• Brightwater Landscape Partnership, County Durham
• ‘Revitalising Redesdale’, Northumberland
• ‘First and Last – Our Living Working Landscape’, Penwith, Cornwall

HLF’s Landscape Partnership programme – which has now been running for over a decade - is the most significant grant scheme available for landscape-scale projects. To date, £146m has been invested in 86 different areas across the UK helping forge new partnerships between public and community bodies and ensuring people are better equipped to understand and tackle the needs of their local landscapes.