The incident happened recently and took a week to deal with. Staff time plus skip hire and removal has been a significant cost to the charity and taken the reserve team away from their work protecting nature sites in the area.

The waste appeared overnight in several loads and contains flooring, mattresses, rubble, plastic and general household waste. Some potential identifying items were found by staff and have been passed on to Bedfordshire Police.

Aidan Matthews, Senior Reserves Manager, said: “It was a shocking sight when our team arrived for a routine check of the nature reserve. There were piles and piles of rubbish everywhere  which must have taken someone quite a while to offload.

“It is unbelievable that someone thinks a nature reserve is an acceptable place to dump waste like this. This is the latest incident in the growing problem of flytipping on our nature reserves and it is certainly the largest we’ve seen. Our team had to work for a week clearing it up and we hired in specialist contractors meaning that it ended up costing thousands of pounds, money and time that should have been spend on protecting wildlife.”

Anyone who would like to support the Trust can donate to its Wilder Future Fund which helps to pay for the management of Fancott and other sites in the area.

The grassland area on the reserve is home to a range of rare wildflowers and grasses. It is part of the Coronation Meadows network of sites launched by then Prince of Wales, now King Charles, in 2013 to protect wildflower meadows. As part of the initiative wildflower seeds from the site are collected and donated to other meadows.