Land Stewardship and River health
With guest author Julian Carnell from The Sharpham trust
Sharpham is a 550-acre estate on the River Dart downstream of Totnes owned and cared for by a charity The Sharpham Trust. The Trust’s mission is to connect people to the natural world with the aim of creating a more mindful, compassionate and environmentally-sustainable world. We do this by offering a range of courses and mindfulness retreats throughout the year, welcoming around 3,000 people annually. Over the last decade we have been focused on integrating our mindfulness work with our land management practices. Around five years ago we switched to organic farming methods and we started rewilding the estate, with our partners Ambios, by reducing grazing pressures on the land which has allowed wildlife to flourish. Because of this, we are seeing a greater diversity of species including plants, insects, small mammals and birds including new ones we haven’t seen before.
During this transition I became more and more interested in the river, after all Sharpham would not exist without the Dart. We were already running canoeing retreats to get people out on the water but it was the discovery that only 58 Salmon had been counted at Totnes weir in 2023 that triggered a desire to do more. I spoke to organisations like the Environment Agency, landowners and Friends of the Dart and decided we needed to try and work together if we wanted to drive change. As a result, we formed the River Dart Catchment Partnership and produced a new Action Plan for the river which we launched in April this year. We’re conscious that there have been plans before and there are many initiatives but there is a lack of coordination and joined up thinking. We’re now working hard to try and turn our plans into actions by securing funding for the partnership.
The Saltmarsh Project which Sharpham has been involved with has been a great example of how partnership working can help get things done. Dart Harbour, The Bioregional Learning Centre and South Devon National Landscape joined Sharpham and the Environment Agency to improve the state of the river’s saltmarsh. Leaky dams were created by volunteers and installed to help retain silt and reduce erosion. In the next phase of the project we are hoping to try to re-create areas of saltmarsh shown on old maps at Sharpham that have since disappeared. You can watch a short film about the project here.
At Sharpham we see the health of our river as a symbol of the breakdown in our relationship with the natural world which we believe is contributing to the multiple crises facing our society and the planet in general. By restoring our rivers, we can help to restore our relationship with nature and through this with each other.