Penwith Farms Projects and Volunteer Training
At CREST, we have training sites all over Cornwall so that we can accommodate different regional styles and specialist skills into our training.
Over the summer, we’ve run a number of Introduction courses on Penwith Farms with old granite hedges in need of repair. This project had three purposes – to introduce trainees to a variety of granite hedge styles, to restore some of our historic hedges to their former glory and to train landscape volunteers how to repair a hedge. These courses included fully funded Volunteer Bursaries to allow those who’d put these skills to use in public or community land, especially in AONB designated areas, to train for free. Here’s some of the beautiful old hedges and brilliant trainees we’ve worked with along the way.
Pictured above is a group of volunteers from both the National Trust and local community orchards who trained as they repaired the hedge behind them, based very near the Botallack Counthouse. Our trainer Daryl is a keen wild swimmer and got quite a few of the trainees in the miner’s pools nearby!
This hedge at Morvah was a typical example of the hedges we repaired where cattle, rabbits and a vast amount of time had lead to partial collapses, preventing the hedge from doing its job properly.
In all weather conditions, we used the set-up days for our trainees to get some work experience of a job on a working farm. Our trainee Bardev and trainer Andrew were pleased with this wet day of hedging, setting up the job and then placing particularly enormous grounders in.
Volunteers from Cornwall Wildlife Trust built the hedge from the grounders up to learn more about how to repair hedges in the protected land that they volunteer in.
Trainees on our Introduction course finished the job!
A couple of trainees used this opportunity to set up and start a job making a Cornish hedge cow-proof again. Built properly, this is expected to last another 200 years without repair.
If you look through the mist, this hedge had sea views! Four volunteers built a lovely hedge on a dairy farm in Morvah.
The finished job.
Four trainees started from scratch at Bosavern Community Farm and we used the hedge they built to run a stile building course for more advanced trainees.
The finished hedge with stile, created by trainees, adding functionality and beauty to a hedge on Bosavern Community Farm which, with the help of a team of farm volunteers and WOOF workers, feeds the local area with fantastic organic veg and runs brilliant education events to learn about sustainable, nature-friendly farming.
Cornwall Heritage Trust funded their volunteers to learn how to build and repair hedges at our main training centre near Sancreed. They built a beautiful bit of hedge and learned a few technical skills for their hedge repairs.