Rewilding the Edges. Restoring Our Stream, Woodland, and Willow Copse

When the estate agent particulars described the eastern boundary of our land as having direct frontage to a babbling stream adjoining the River Torridge, they were being diplomatically kind. What we found was a watercourse that had been heavily managed over decades banked, cleared, and straightened in places with little of the dense marginal vegetation, overhanging cover, and varied channel structure that makes a Devon stream truly alive.

The River Torridge is otter country. It is one of the better rivers in the south-west for this most secretive and magnificent of British mammals. And yet otters need more than just water. They need dense, undisturbed bankside cover. They need trees whose roots create the dark, sheltered holts they use for resting and raising cubs. They need a food chain, with invertebrates, amphibians and fish, that only thrives in a healthy, varied aquatic ecosystem. Restoring our stream and its surroundings is one of the projects we care about most.

What the stream needs

A healthy lowland stream in Devon should meander. It should have shallow gravelly sections and deeper pools. Its banks should be dense with vegetation sedges, rushes, and wildflowers at the margins, with larger trees providing overhanging canopy. Fallen woody debris in the channel is not a problem to be cleared. It is habitat for invertebrates, a surface for biofilms, and a natural mechanism for slowing water and creating the varied flow that fish and other wildlife need.

Our stream had lost much of this. The banks were open, the channel relatively uniform, and the tree cover sparse along much of its length. We are working to change that systematically and patiently.

Our approach to restoration

We will be planting native trees and shrubs along the stream banks such as alder and willow, chosen because they belong in this landscape and provide the most value to the ecosystem. Alder, in particular, is a remarkable tree for waterway restoration. Its roots stabilise banks, its leaf fall provides a food source for invertebrates, and its canopy creates the shaded, cool conditions that fish prefer.

We are leaving woody debris in the channel rather than removing it. We are allowing the marginal vegetation to establish naturally, intervening only to prevent invasive species from taking hold.

The stream will be allowed to find its own level of naturalness, with our role being to remove the obstacles to that process rather than to impose a design on it.

The willow copse

Above the stream, on slightly higher ground, we are establishing a willow copse that serves multiple purposes on the farm.

Willow is coppiced on a rotation, cut back to a stump every few years, and produces an extraordinary volume of biomass in return. That biomass becomes our primary mulching material across the whole farm. Rather than bringing in woodchip from elsewhere, we are growing our own fertility on-site, closing the nutrient loop as completely as we can.

A managed willow copse is also exceptionally valuable wildlife habitat. The dense regrowth after coppicing creates thick cover for nesting birds. The standing stools, over time, develop hollows and dead wood that support beetles, bats, and other species. The catkins are among the earliest pollen sources available to bees in late winter and early spring, a critical resource when little else is flowering.

The woodland

The existing woodland on our boundary is being actively managed for what appears to have been the first time in many years. This means selectively thinning to allow light to reach the woodland floor, encouraging the natural regeneration of native species, and removing invasive plants that are suppressing diversity.

We are extending the woodland's footprint where the land boundary allows, connecting it to the hedgerow network and to the stream corridor to create continuous habitat linkage across our land.

Connected habitat is disproportionately more valuable than fragmented habitat. A hedgerow that links a woodland to a stream corridor allows wildlife to move, feed, and breed across a landscape rather than being isolated in small pockets. We think of our hedgerows, stream margin, and woodland as infrastructure as important to the farm's function as any building or piece of equipment.

Who do we hope to see?

We are not naive about timelines. Otters will come to our stream when the conditions are right, when the bankside cover is established, the food chain is healthy, and the disturbance is low. That might be two years from now. It might be five.

We are also creating conditions for kingfishers, which need vertical earth banks for nest burrows and clear water with good invertebrate populations. For grass snakes, which thrive in rough grassland and marginal habitats near water. For the full suite of Devon farmland birds yellowhammer, linnet, bullfinch, spotted flycatcher whose populations have declined catastrophically over the past forty years because the habitat they depend on has been systematically removed from the farmed landscape.

We are not trying to create a nature reserve separate from a farm. We are trying to demonstrate that these two things are not separate at all.