AN EMERGENCY appeal to save land near Wareham from development has raised £300,000 in just two weeks.

Dorset Wildlife Trust will find out today whether its bid to buy 120 acres of land at Creech is successful.

The auction takes places this afternoon at Springfield Country Hotel, near Wareham.

The land is being sold by quarry company Imerys, formerly British China Clay, and is divided into four plots - including the Great Wood, an SSSI ancient woodland.

A third plot is a mixture of meadow and ancient woodland and two plots are farmland which the trust would like to save from possible development and turn into a wildlife habitat.

Alastair Cook, of the DWT, said: "We only heard that this land was up for sale three and a half weeks ago.

"For some reason we were not on the seller's list of potential buyers so we only heard on the grapevine that this land was up for grabs.

"The money has flooded in and we have passed our original target of £200,000 which was the guide price the auctioneer had set.

"We will go to the auction with £300,000 but we are not sure who we are up against. We've heard rumours that a well-off landowner wants to buy all the plots available, but that may be just a rumour."

The trust boasts a membership of 18,000 which is growing by 1,000 per month.

Some £200,000 of the appeal total is in the form of loans.

Securing the land will double the size of the trust's existing nature reserve and connect areas of important wildlife land, enabling major habitat re-creation to take place.

It will also open up a large area of countryside for the public. The trust's emergency appeal line is 01305 251464.

First published: August 20