A FORMER oil refinery site, aiming to be crowned the nation’s best nature reserve, needs your votes to help it win a top prize.

Canvey Wick in Northwick Road, on Canvey, is in the running to scoop the Nature Reserve of the Year category in the BBC Countryfile Magazine Awards for 2017, just three years after it opened to the public as a Site of Specific Scientific Interest.

It is owned by national land management charity the Land Trust, managed in partnership with the RSPB and Buglife. and has been featured in an array of wildlife programmes.

Pat Wortley, chairman of South Essex Natural History Society, says its journey began in 1999, when the group’s president Don Down stumbled across “a carpet of Southern Marsh orchids” on the land.

She said: “Don set about researching the wildlife of the site, he is a naturalist with a special interest in butterflies and moths.

“He visited the site many times over the years and recorded its inhabitants, including the rare Shrill Carder Bee. He logged 24 types of butterflies, 194 Macro moths and 30 Micro moths, as well as finding the Small Ranunculus moth which had been regarded as extinct.

A long campaign to publicise the potential of the area to local people and to interested organisations began, with the group gaining support after it was designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest in 2005 and opening to the public.

The site was originally grazing marsh and was then partially developed in the 1960s as an oil refinery.

Despite never being used, it was decommissioned in 1973 and left a varied site, with marshy floods, ditches, ponds, bramble patches, gravels, sandy banks and bare concrete.

Voting for the awards is open until Tuesday, February 28.

To cast a vote, or for more information, visit countryfile.com/awards