AN AREA of outstanding natural beauty has been awarded more than £1.5 million by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Cranborne Chase - a dramatic and historic chalk landscape - was awarded the sum of £1,684,100 by the HLF through its Landscape Partnership programme.

The funds will be used to help conserve and enhance the area.

AONB director Linda Nunn said: “We are absolutely delighted to have received this wonderful grant. It will transform our ability to conserve and enhance this truly outstanding area.”

As well as developing a range of activities allowing visitors to further explore the area and learn of its unique heritage, projects will also be launched to build on the area's links with the surrounding market towns including Shaftesbury, Wimborne, Salisbury and Warminster.

The programme will continue until 2024.

Ros Kerslake, chief executive of the Heritage Lottery Fund, said: “Our historic landscapes are incredibly important to people’s wellbeing and need to be protected. Some of the landscapes we are funding today are in the most remote parts of the UK; others form an important backdrop to some of our largest cities.

"What they all have in common is the potential to make people’s lives better, which is why they are so richly deserving of National Lottery money.”