Cornish conservation charity launches major ‘Tor to Shore’ rewilding project

A Cornish conservation charity has launched an ambitious rewilding project intended to benefit creatures from marsh fritillary butterflies living high on the moor to long-snouted seahorses in seagrass in a bay five miles away.

The Tor to Shore project will stretch from Helman Tor, a reserve topped with a granite boulder summit near Bodmin, to St Austell Bay via the tumbling River Par, its idea to improve a landscape at scale.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund has awarded the Cornwall Wildlife Trust a £265,000 development grant for the project, and if it goes to plan another £3m should follow.

The trust’s chief executive, Matt Walpole, said: “For too long conservation efforts on land and at sea have been fragmented. Joined-up efforts to create bigger, better, more connected landscapes and seascapes can be transformative for nature recovery.”

Tor to Shore builds on work the trust has carried out over the past 18 months, including the introduction of Tamworth pigs and English longhorn cattle that roam, rootle and graze among wet woodland and heathland at Helman, a 730-acre reserve.

The idea of the pigs and cattle is that their digging and chomping create better conditions for a varied selection of birds, mammals and insects to thrive in. “The pigs are extraordinary ecosystem engineers,” Walpole said. “By opening up the soil, they allow other things to emerge. Pigs work through a landscape really quickly.”

They have been helped by the unexpected arrival of two beavers at the site in February, which have begun building dams. “They will really enrich that space, help to re-wet that landscape,” Walpole said. It is not clear how the beavers arrived and the trust has said a third party may have released them.

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Areas downstream that border the Par are surrounded by farmland, and here the project intends to work in partnership with local farmers to tackle agricultural pollution and create wildlife corridors for animals to move through. Species expected to benefit from the inland portion of the scheme include willow tits, yellowhammers and dormice.

The Par spills out into St Austell Bay, where Cornwall Wildlife Trust research confirmed the existence of one of the UK’s largest subtidal seagrass beds in 2023. The bay is also home to beds of maerl, a hard, calcified seaweed known locally as Cornish coral that forms over thousands of years.

Walpole said that by working with farmers whose land borders the river, it was hoped that the level of nitrates and phosphates that run off fields into rivers could be cut.

In the bay, as well as the seahorses, it is hoped that cuckoo wrasse, one of the most colourful fish in UK waters and bull huss, a small member of the shark family, will be helped to thrive.

Walpole said: “You can see how interconnected these things are. The idea is we move beyond preserving the last of what’s left in isolated, fragmented nature reserves and into a much more ambitious vision of a joined up, bigger, better, more connected landscape and seascape, with nature recovery rather than just nature conservation.”