They are in nearly every village, town and city across the UK, thousands of church buildings peppering the landscape. But while many may no longer be in regular use, the churchyards surrounding them – quiet, peaceful and often ancient – amount to what Olivia Graham, the bishop of Reading, equates to “a small national park”. The land beyond the church gate is some of the most biodiverse in the UK because it has largely stayed untouched.

“A churchyard is a little snapshot of how the countryside used to be,” says Somerset Wildlife Trust’s Pippa Rayner, who is working on Wilder Churches, a new initiative with the diocese of Bath and Wells “to enhance churchyard biodiversity across the county”.

“Very often in a highly industrialised rural landscape, the fields around villages may be covered in agricultural chemicals. You often find that the churchyard is the one place in the area where they haven’t been using chemicals,” says Rayner. “The fact that they generally have been managed differently to the rest of the countryside, and they have been looked after in a different way, has enabled species to still be there,” she adds.

Wilder Churches is one of several schemes that have launched across the UK with the aim of maximising biodiversity in churchyards. David Curry leads the Living Churchyards project in south-west England, a voluntary scheme that advises local clerics on how to use the land surrounding their church for the benefit of nature.

“Eight hundred years ago, pagan sites – springs, wells or woodland glades – had Christian churches built on top of them,” says Curry. “Around the church is an area – the litten – where people are buried. A couple of hundred years later, somebody decided that all churches should have a wall placed around them. Since then, they’ve never been ploughed, treated with chemicals or anything like that. So you have this amazing genetic bank, which originated in whatever that habitat was 800 years ago, just sat there – and it’s still there.”

Rayner believes that the lack of pollution and a relative lack of human activity in churchyards makes them a much-needed sanctuary for wildlife.

“Wildlife, as well as needing to feed, needs to hide, shelter and nest. Churchyards offer loads of opportunities for that,” says Rayner. “They are brilliant for lots of different things: it could be birds, lots of lesser-known plants, things like lichens, mosses and liverworts, which are sort of pioneer species that will grow on stones and gravelly areas associated with a churchyard. It’s a fantastic place for bees and butterflies, but also for the less noticeable small mammals, which in turn provide food for birds of prey and owls.”

“Churchyards are some of the least polluted lands around,” says Andy Atkins, chief executive of A Rocha UK, a Christian conservation charity whose “eco-church” programme rewards churches for taking positive actions for climate and nature. Last year, it saw the highest number of sign-ups for the programme in its six-year history, with 10% of churches in England and Wales now pledging their commitment to the scheme.

St James’s Piccadilly in central London is a gold standard eco church, in part due to its efforts in promoting biodiversity in an urban space. Deborah Colvin, one of the churchwardens, says they are hopeful their churchyard can provide a green link in a concrete landscape. “Let’s have hedgehogs going overground from Regent’s Park to the river,” says Colvin. “It’s a joke, but if you start thinking like that, then what would you put in place? The sort of work that you might do in this environment … is about linkages, corridors.”

The Churches Count on Nature scheme is another initiative that launched in 2021, a joint effort by the Church of England, A Rocha UK, Caring for God’s Acre and the Church in Wales to encourage people to observe and record the different species in their churchyards over a week. Sixteen thousands records were submitted to the national biodiversity database and Helen Stephens, head of A Rocha UK’s eco-church initiative, says some of the findings were remarkable. “At one church in Ham, south-west London, in the middle of a housing estate, on not much land, they counted 100 species of plants in one small patch of grass, including a fairly rare bee orchid,” she says.