8 minute read

Or, you can listen to the full conversation on The Wild Cornwall Podcast.

What do you do for Cornwall Wildlife Trust?

I am the Head of Nature Reserves, so I look after the department which manages all the reserves across the county. I manage the staff, get involved with fundraising, and look at acquisitions. So occasionally, we buy new bits of land, and I'm heavily involved in that.

What's your favourite part of the job?

Possibly the last bit that I just mentioned: acquisitions. That is a great thing to be involved in. There’s just something very appealing about identifying a piece of land, working on pulling together the funding to be able to buy it, and then adding that to the land we already manage and making it better for wildlife. Very satisfying.

Tell me more about Helman Tor…

Well, it the Trust's largest nature reserve: a collection of sites we've acquired over the years. A great place to start any walk here is to come to the car park and walk up to the top of the Tor because then you can see all the land beneath it.

You've got quite a variety of habitats. The slopes of the Tor has got the rocks scattered around. Then you're down into a very wet mosaic of different habitats: wet woodland, wet heathland, open water… a real variety of habitats – and with that a real variety of wildlife as well. Lots of interesting and rare species here.

What sort of thing might you see?

So we're getting close to marsh fritillary time: a rare butterfly, and on a sunny day you should see them. They do well in this kind of habitat, but places like this have declined and disappeared, so this place is a real stronghold for that butterfly. And we want to link and create new habitats to help them expand their populations.

We've also got small pearl bordered fritillaries, which are nice to see, and silver studded blue. 

And then a whole range of birds. One specialist, fairly rare bird now is the willow tit. The habitat here in certain parts of the site is good for the willow tit, but we need to manage it in a certain way to make it better. We’d love to help that species which has been declining.

Dormice! I can't guarantee you'll see a dormouse, but they are amazing and we monitor them to establish whether the population is doing ok. You need to have a licence to handle dormice and I’ve been privileged to have seen them.

It's also great for dragonflies and damselflies. There's a quite a rare damselfly called a small red damselfly, which is a specialist and quite rare. I like them because they’re easier to recognise because of their little red legs. I work in the office a lot, so my ID skills are a bit ropey these days, so something like that really helps!

Now you mentioned land acquisition. This is the Trust’s 60th anniversary year. How has this nature reserve changed over time?

It's been a story of expansion, which is great. We have this kind of mantra – they’re called the Lawton principles – where we say bigger, better, more joined up. The bigger a site is for wildlife, the more it gives the habitats and the species opportunities to expand and protects them more. And then better is about making that habitat as good as it possibly can be. Joined up is kind of self-explanatory: linking areas of wildlife habitat.

The history of Helman Tor Nature Reserve has been all about making it bigger, better and more joined up. In the 1980s, we bought Breney Common… and then Red Moor: big bits of wet grassland, woodland heathland. Then in the early 2000s, we bought the farmland in the middle… and so we linked those two bits of habitat. We’ve done as much as we possibly can to make the farmland there as good for wildlife and to link the two.

And we actually bought the Tor itself within the last couple of years, which gives its name to the nature reserve. It gives you amazing views. And at this time of year it’s lovely to see because it’s covered in bluebells. It's also an important historic site. It’s a County Geological Site and there are the remains of a Neolithic hill settlement here which is a Scheduled Ancient Monument. So that that adds extra interest.

So, what are the current plans?

Well, we have an opportunity to purchase Creney Farm. If you see it on a map it’s like a jigsaw piece: it’s surrounded on three sides, mostly by Red Moor land which we already own and manage. And now we have this amazing, once in a lifetime opportunity to buy the farm. We are looking to buy the farm buildings as well, because that would give us excellent new access into the whole reserve for staff managing the reserve, and also for visitors.

So we've got chance to buy what would be about nearly 100 acres of new land, where we can create new habitats and do great things on the ground for wildlife. It also opens up management possibilities for the whole reserve, which would then be 730 acres. So, a big site!

A phrase you hear a lot at the moment is rewilding. Can you tell me what that's about and how it links to our plans for this place?

Rewilding means different things to different people. But I think most of us get the simple concept of letting nature get on and do things. Here at Creney Farm we would be able to create some new habitats. There are some very wet bits there already that have been broken in for farming, but they will revert quite easily to native wildlife habitat… letting those bits go wild is going to be fairly straightforward.

Currently, we do quite a lot of intervention and management work which involves scrub clearance. In some cases, chemical treatments to try to stop the scrub from growing back. That's been going on for a long time. It's just a repeat cycle of getting in there with volunteers, staff or contractors to clear scrub – and more often than not, coming back two years later do it all over again! It can be quite soul destroying. But with rewilding we're now thinking more in terms of managing by working more with natural processes. We're trying to do this work, but actually, could we introduce different types of grazing, large herbivores to do it?

We're also thinking of introducing beavers into this environment so that they could do a lot of that work for us. I could take you to a bit of the site which was cleared by contractors a couple of years ago for about £120,000 pounds… But I could pretty much guarantee that beavers would have done that for free! They work all year round.

So that's where we're heading. There are a lot of things we need to do. You can't just let beavers out here. We’ve done a feasibility study which has come back recognising it's very favourable habitat for beavers. We also need to follow government rules and consult local people. It's an idea, but it will certainly make management here more sustainable. And that's what we'd like to work towards.

Do you feel hopeful about the future? Do you have a sense that we can bring about recovery in Cornwall’s wild places?

I think we have to be positive. I've known this site for over 20 years. And we've held it in this in this state, but it's been a difficult battle. It’s sad when you hear that even though the nature reserve might look good, there are wildlife species declining, and possibly because of factors that not on the nature reserve: pesticides in the wider environment… climate change.

So we've absolutely got to give wildlife the best opportunity it can on sites like this. It's almost also very important to look out for the wider countryside. Farming is critical. We’re hoping to buy Creney farm to create new wildlife habitats… but productive, profitable farms need to exist, and they've got their part to play for wildlife as well. We can't just manage our nature reserves within the boundary – we've got to look outside. We're looking at a project that is from Helman Tor to St. Austell Bay which considers everything that's going on in the environment here. Following the watercourses from the Tor to the shore, working with farmers through that catchment, helping and supporting them. And then ultimately getting to the bay and working with the with the fishermen and all the communities who have interest in the area.

So that that's where our optimism has to come from. It has to be society deciding they want these things rather than Cornwall Wildlife Trust drawing the line around reserves and saying, ‘This is where nature lives’. It doesn't – it lives everywhere.

What can any of us do to take action ourselves?

There are lots of ways! We are launching this very ambitious land appeal, so please donate to that. There are also opportunities to volunteer with us. Some people have the time and like to get their hands dirty. The best way to provide long term support for Cornwall Wildlife Trust is to become a member. Then the kind of choices individuals make in their own lives can have a real impact on some of the bigger things we're talking about like biodiversity loss and climate change. It's all our responsibility, isn't it? We can all make a difference.

Click to donate to our land purchase appeal