Mike Onslow juts out his chin as he scans the deep slug tracks that motorbikes have carved into a 40m-year-old sand dune on the newly-created nature reserve of Borkenberge, his former training camp.

“These ‘motocross’ guys are causing enormous, irreplaceable damage,” the lieutenant colonel says. “When I think about all the environmental protection work that the British army and the German federal authorities have done for this area, it really grips my bits.”

Borkenberge is one of 62 military bases in Germany that were last month earmarked solely for nature conservation. As the threat of Russian invasion ebbed after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the closures offer a late “cold war peace dividend” for hard-pressed public funds and wildlife.

Where once the area’s fields were laboratories for ways of inflicting death, today they are being used to preserve the lives of threatened flora and fauna. The stunning heathlands, moors, woods, bogs and sand dunes here are a wildlife oasis amid the urban sprawl of the Ruhr Valley. Forestry officials say they have the military to thank for this.

The reserve had been used as a German military training ground since the 1870s, before British forces took it over in 1945. Its contours have barely been touched by industrialisation.

Aerial view, Borkenberge British military training area, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, Europe. Photograph: Alamy

“These are the best conservation areas we have,” said Jurgen Rost, the director of the Rhine-Weser federal forestry agency. “There are no other places this wild and unsettled. Sometimes I think the military performed a public interest because they protected the nature here. Today we have another public interest, in making sure these spaces are not resettled or cut apart by roads.”

Pressure for development is one issue. Public visits are another. Despite an entry ban on the area enforced by heavy fines, trespass is common andmotocross bikers regularly scramble up Borkenberge’s steep sandy banks. This wears away the land’s soft topsoil and means that the bikers have to regularly forge new tracks, carving fresh ruts into the dunes each time.

“They’re criminals and they’re very aggressive. We’ve had incidents where they actually drove straight at the foresters trying to run them over,” said Rost, standing at the summit of a sandy tor. “This hill was a chalk reef in the time of the dinosaurs but I’m sure it will disappear in 20-30 years if the bikers go on this way.” Hillside sands churned up by motorbike wheels are flushed down the hill in ensuing rains, Rost says.

But the site has a special lure for risk-addicted bikers. Borkenberge has been used to test tanks, bullets, bombs and the famous Krupp gun, which was manufactured locally. As a result, unexploded ordnance litters the 18sq km area, posing a threat to the deers, boar and foxes that roam its lands – as well as humans.

“It is forbidden to drive here because we don’t know what is on the side of the roads. If you leave the car, you have to look where you are putting your foot,” Rost said. “Sometimes animals meet their deaths from munitions but they are still increasing in numbers.”

“We don’t know exactly what type of ordnance is here because the military usage of the site dates back to 1873,” added Karsten Pfaue, the forestry official in charge of munitions disposal. His department is undertaking a historical survey to try to work this out, which will hopefully be followed by safe routes for ambulances, fire brigades and other rescue services.

Even so, “we will have to walk a very long path until this area is cleared,” he says.



Former british military camp at Haltern near Münster. Photograph: Markus Lokai

Bushes are riddled with bullets while plants may push deadly grenades, buried for decades, to the surface. In heavy rains, ordnance could even be washed onto roads.



“We’ve been able to clear most of the stuff that we put down here but the fact is that it is still a dangerous place,” said Onslow, the commander of British training forces in Germany. “If the Germans have found a good way of using this land with all its limitations – not least the potential ordnance in the ground which will bubble up over time – then that’s fantastic news, it really is.”

British forces have won local hearts and minds by spending €1m a year on environmental protection work in Germany, cutting grass and heathlands, clearing paths and removing dead trees from swamps.



Borkenberge’s heathlands may be seeded with explosives but they still constitute a safer environment for nightjars, fairy shrimp and 400 other endangered species than anywhere else in the Ruhr Valley, a testament to the destructive footprint of urban development, as well as EU conservation laws.

Plans are in place to reintroduce grazing animals such as bison, red deer and wild horses, according to Annette Schulte Bocholt, a local conservation official. Controlled environmental tourism and education projects could follow soon after.

A long-leaved sundew is among the flora and fauna that will flourish in the former military zones of Borkenbergen. Photograph: Blickwinkel/Alamy

“This is a really special area,” she said. “In the Middle Ages, North Rhine Westphalia would have looked like this. We have rare flora here – peat orchids, bog cranberries and mosses – and whenever you investigate, you always find something new. It is very diverse, undamaged by fertilisers, and it has not been fragmented by roads.”

The future shape of Borkenberge though will be determined by an ownership battle raging between several groups, setting hearts racing among local farmers. Some would like to buy ancestral lands back.

Christoph Konemann’s family were issued with a compulsory purchase order and forced to sell land to the training camp many years ago, when it was expanded. Big landowners with better lawyers were able to delay the process, and so take advantage of a 30-year statute of limitations to claim redress, he said.

But rather than rural aristocrats, the focus of Konemann’s discontent now is conservation NGOs bidding to run the site. “My fellow farmers are angry about these very radical and ideological NGOs and nature conservationists which don’t have a historic link to the area but categorically claim it,” he said.

“Farmers are concerned that the nature conservation lobby will flock to this area and put it under close protection. Then hunting would be forbidden and there could be a rapid increase in wild boar that would generate pests like swine flu. That is our fear.”

Anxieties about the timing of the camp’s closure – as a resurgent Russia flexes its muscles in nearby Ukraine – are more low key. Asked about the risk, Rost said that it was not his decision but added: “I won’t give up these wild military areas because they are the best protection for animals and plant species.”

In a symbol of the strange formations that history’s ebbs and flows have etched onto the landscape, Rost said that he was planning a new statue in the Borkenberge conservation area.

“I want to put an old tank here as a monument to the time of military use, for the people who will come here in the years ahead,” he said. “It will signify why this area has been kept in such a good condition.”