Greencliff Farm is situated on an exposed headland on the north coast of Devon, and Nick has been asked by the owners to “do a Roborough” in one of their fields.
Sue and Sam own 85 acres and are “rewilding” big areas with tree planting, lots of flower meadows and ponds and scrapes. Nick’s work will involve putting up a “sky table” for feeding birds of prey, erecting a Kestrel nest box, and creating five new ponds and renovating five more. There will also be extensive turf removal to promote floral diversity and the creation of Devon banks and some ephemeral ponds too. In the long run, this will turn what is currently sheep pasture into a much more biodiverse piece of habitat.
We plan to document much of his work via videos that we will share on our YouTube channel, and on this page we will share photos from the project too.
Below is the exposed blank canvas that Nick will start from:
Day One:
Days Two & Three:
Day Four:
A Sky Table and a Kestrel Box
“Here at Greencliff Farm we invited Nick Benge from Roborough Rewilders to really change up the landscape of one of our fields from grassy lawn to a fabulous mosaic of ponds, scrapes and banks.
Nick was super professional and over-delivered on his promises, adapting on the job to make the most of the geology and geomorphology. He also used his expertise to improve some of our older ponds, by creating shelving in the pond which wildlife love, increasing the depth where required and creating drainage and overflows.
He also built us a fabulous sky table with camera post which we are monitoring to check for bird arrivals and installed a kestrel box on to one of our old telegraph poles which I have already seen a kestrel sitting on!
It was a fun, exciting week seeing the transformation of the landscape, and now it’s raining all the ponds are coming alive. I’d highly recommend Nick for all his environmental knowledge, good humour and getting everything done on time and under budget!”
Sue Samuel