Wild Hamatethy

Overview

Not long ago Hamatethy was a fairly ordinary upland farm: around a thousand ewes, beef cattle, fertiliser, subsidy. Yan and Camilla Swiderski dropped the sheep, converted to organic, and found the land answered faster than they expected. Insects came back, then small mammals, then the birds that eat them.

What followed is one of the larger private rewilding projects in the south west: 750 acres running from the Camel valley up onto Bodmin Moor, worked on with ecologists including Benedict Macdonald and Derek Gow.

The Land

The estate holds fragments of Atlantic temperate rainforest, older deciduous woodland, native orchards and young wood pasture, with the River Camel and its tributaries running through. To the north it reaches into Bodmin Moor, and both the river and the moor carry statutory protection.

The clearest single change is water. Beavers turned a shaded, trickling stream into a working wetland, which is now among the richest parts of the estate.

Species & Grazers

Alongside the reintroductions, free-roaming Welsh Black cattle, Tamworth pigs and Exmoor ponies do the work that missing wild herbivores used to do: grazing unevenly, rootling up bare ground for seed, trampling, dunging and generally keeping the place from settling into one uniform habitat.

Deer pressure is managed, brash piles are built, wildflowers are seeded, and threatened species are monitored with local conservation groups and Cornwall Wildlife Trust. Pine marten, glow-worms and nightjar are on the hoped-for list.

The Cornwall Stork Project

White storks were bred at Hamatethy from 2021, and the interest that generated among other Cornish landowners led to The Cornwall Stork Project, now a registered charity working towards a wild breeding population across Cornwall and the wider south west.

Storks are a good indicator species. They hunt within a few kilometres of the nest and eat worms, insects, amphibians and small mammals, so a landscape that can feed them is a landscape that is feeding a great deal else.

Visiting & Volunteering

Hamatethy funds part of its restoration through stays and nature experiences at Hamatethy House, and it takes volunteers on the land. Details are at wildhamatethy.com. It is a model we recognise: visitors help pay for the recovery they have come to see.

Related Grange Project Content

Read our guides to white storks and Celtic rainforest, or return to the rewilding organisations hub.