Last month we went to the Cumbria Nature Festival at Rivendell near Workington. It was very enjoyable and informative plus it’s an interesting woodland site.
I saw the event on Facebook a while back and I’d never heard of the Rivendell venue before. It’s about 9 acres of mostly woodland, on a slope, with some small level clearings with stages or camping areas, and a big level clearing near the bottom with a large marquee and space for gazebos. There’s a lane along the length of it with a couple of car parks. The whole thing is hidden at the end of a private road that starts next to a petrol station on the main road and you would never know it was there.
I think they were aiming for 500 people for the Cumbria Nature Festival. It had a lot of talks each about an hour long from various nature based groups (like Wildlife Trusts). There were also activities like bird box making and storytelling that we didn’t go to. It felt like what the Timber Festival in the National Forest should have been.
There were two talks about amphibians and about reptiles by the Cumbria Amphibians and Reptiles Group which I found the most useful. I had an idea to put down corrugated iron sheets in the wood to encourage and detect reptiles but one talk mentioned using bitumen roofing sheets. These are a lot easier to cut up and even to handle, and I think I might get some black ones, and cut them down to squarish pieces and dot them around the wood.
There were talks by Terry Abraham about red squirrels in Cumbria via the medium of his own films, and one by John Hodgson about restoring Hardknott Forest, converting cleared conifer plantation into oak, birch, holly and rowan, mostly using volunteers. Quite a lot about change over decades.
The final talk we stayed for was in the evening, when it was getting cold, by people from University of Cumbria about relocating Pine Martens from Scotland to Cumbria and then tracking them. It was striking how mobile they can be. Moving tens of miles soon after release if they want. Crossing the M6 even. This makes me think that they will be able to move along hedges and buffer strips for nature, as we have surrounding Century Wood for example. I’ve seen previous claims that Pine Martens need big woodlands but really it’s that they need one or two hundred hectares of woodland in their territory which can be 25 km2!
The Rivendell site itself is a mixture of conifer and broadleaf woodland and even areas like orchards. Some planted, and lots of natural regeneration by species like birch. As well as the Cumbria Nature Festival it also hosts regular music festivals which must be very atmospheric too. We’ll definitely be back in future.