Eco-Tourism at Elmley Nature Reserve

Podcast transcript

Rob Smith: Marshes and Wetlands really are such an essential habitat in our countryside, especially for migrating birds which stop over along the UK shorelines to rest and feed as they move between Africa and Europe and the Arctic in spring and autumn. And one of the most special places that we have in Kent is at Elmley on the Isle of Sheppey, 3,300 acres of land that is a privately owned National Nature Reserve. And what makes it special, apart from the incredible variety of birds and other wildlife you can find there, is that the land is farmed and open to the public. In fact, you can actually stay there. Part of how the land is managed and funded is by having some very glamorous cabins and rooms on the site. Many of them set up so you can line bed with full length windows at the foot, allowing an uninterrupted view of the land for spectacular sunrises and sunsets.

Rob Smith: Now, the reserve is owned by Gareth and Georgina Fulton. And I met up with Gareth to see what they do there. And we started off in a building called the Linhay, which is a former Victorian Cattle Shed. That's now a place where guests can gather to slump in front of the fire and brew themselves a cup of tea or indeed take something a little stronger. Now, Gareth told me how the farm was actually designated a SSSI in the early 1980s, which means that since then they haven't been able to do any arable farming or use chemical inputs on the land.

Gareth Fulton: We did a landscape change over 3000 acres. So it's a large site. So that whole landscape habitat, which changed in the eighties, it sort of matured in the nineties. And then we've been really stable on our stewardship of the marshes for the last 20 years, really. And the wildlife populations are now what they were pre industrial farming.

Rob Smith: So what does that mean? How many birds are we talking about being on the site?

Gareth Fulton: So we're talking like sort of three to four hundred pairs of lapwing, 400 plus pairs of redshank nesting, hundreds of pairs of skylark. We've got 12 breeding pairs of marsh harrier. So there's full assemblage.

Rob Smith: And everybody is getting very excited today. There's a white tailed sea eagle has been spotted on the site.

Gareth Fulton: Yeah, the white tailed sea eagle is about… And that was a reintroduction, the Isle of White, and they're spreading up the coast, but that moves to where the food is, right? And so it shows that marshes have got plentiful supply of geese and ducks, and Fiona, who's with us, we did the wetland bird survey on Monday, and we counted about 45,000 wetland birds on the marshes.

Rob Smith: And I just want to sort of talk about you just for a moment because you actually come from a military background, don't you? You weren't a farmer. You don't come from that kind of a background at all. So, how did you take this on?

Gareth Fulton: Life happened really. I'm from rural Yorkshire, but my previous career is in the army, and I met my now wife, and we came here to diversify because Kingsville farm was mostly derelict and lots of potential, but underused, it's right in the middle of reserve. So we had the concept of creating a really sensitive tourism development like they do in Africa, where you can have tourism in the middle of a wildlife rich area without a negative impact. And so we've done that very slowly and gently over the last 10 years, introducing people to stay, and try and draw an audience that wouldn't necessarily come to a nature reserve. But how we got there was essentially, there was already a group of people coming to Elmley. And there was RSPB, at least part of the reserve for many years. And that ended in 2013. So we wanted to sustain the public access and public visits but at the same time make Elmley resilient as a private business. We never really say private, but it's a family run, family owned farm and nature reserve. And that only works if you can make it sustainable financially and for the people running it. So our concept was to diversify the income away from land management or include land management and then include tourism, where people are coming.

Rob Smith: And so that means you've got a whole bunch of quite nice sort of little hotel rooms and caravans and things that are actually scattered out on the marsh. So it is a kind of a sort of luxury safari in the Kent marshes.

Gareth Fulton: Yeah, I mean, when we first moved here, we were waking up and watching sunrise and just thinking, this is just incredible. And Sheppey has not got the best reputation. We didn't really have that baggage of what it could be or what it should be or what people's concept of it was. We just thought Elmley is this unbelievable place, which feels like you're in Africa much of the time in the summer with huge sunrise and vast landscapes and full of wildlife. And we thought, well, why not allow people to experience that? But we didn't want it sort of her-shirted and sort of slightly frugal. We wanted people to have what they want, but also be in nature, be surrounded by it. So the concept is really comfortable bed, really high quality stay, lovely coffee and all the rest of it. But you can open your bi-fold windows and the marsh harrier, the harrier is right in front of you, and you can enjoy it, but you can also be comfortable.

Rob Smith: Right. I think we should go and have a look at some of this then see what that actually looks like. Let’s go and have a look. So 10 years ago, this was pretty derelict.

Gareth Fulton: Yeah. Complete. So Kingsville farmhouse is…. it's Kings Hill and Kingsville farmhouse, guess its name. James II was imprisoned here in 1688. He's a Catholic king of England fleeing to France to his Catholic friends as William of Orange was invited to the throne. So he was on the Swale, got captured and they didn't know what to do with him. So they put him in the remote farmhouse of Elmley.

Rob Smith: This actual farmhouse?

Gareth Fulton: This actual house. And then there's a Victorian lamp put on the end for school mistress because we used to have a brick factory, it used to be an industrial site in Victorian times. So she lived there, farm, family in the back. And then tenant farmers through the 20th century, RSPB wardens in the seventies and eighties. And then derelicts from about the nineties. And we planned to renovate it. Plan took a long time because it's listed and it's in the middle of a national nature reserve. And we finally got planning and did the work in 2018, finished it in spring 19, got to run it for six months, then Covid hit. So that was fun. But it's six bed, large house. It faces a swale. It's just the most bonkers location because we'll just walk down here and see the view. But yeah, restored an amazing building. It's a real heart of Kings Hill Farm, obviously. There we go.

Rob Smith: So this is one of what, what do you call this?

Gareth Fulton: This one is called salt box.

Rob Smith: So, it's not a shepherd hut, but it's a big hut, isn't it?

Gareth Fulton: A cabin. Yeah.

Rob Smith: Right.

Gareth Fulton: The salt box is an old name for, literally, a box that keeps salting out on the marshes because it was so, we used to create salt from managing the land, when they end the land, they'd create salt out the ground and store it because very valuable. So there's a bit of history to it, but yeah.

Rob Smith: But this is proper, I mean, it's like a hotel, isn't it? You know, you've got a lovely big bed that looks immediately out through, the whole end of the cabin is glass and it just looks across the marsh and it's uninterrupted. You can't see, well, there's pylons right on the horizon, but there's nothing in the foreground here. This is landscape as you would've seen it 200 years ago.

Gareth Fulton: Yeah, or more. I mean, this is timeless really. This landscape of the coastal marshes and full of wildlife that there would've been there 200, 300 years ago, which is even more red on the landscape.

Rob Smith: Yeah, absolutely. So people, you come and you lie in bed here, and which way are we facing? So the sunrises over there, you watch the sun come up in the morning?

Gareth Fulton: We face the sunrise. Yeah. And that's huge. And we often say we've all got curtains and blinds and things. We often say don't close them because actually seeing sunrise over the marshes is really special and you can always sleep later. But yeah, no, it's got in showers, kitchen and outdoor bath and fire pits.

Rob Smith: All the mod cons.

Gareth Fulton: All the mod cons.

Rob Smith: It's lovely. And then if we come around the corner here, I'm just going to walk around here and just give you a little tap. It's quite breezy and wet today. But outside the back door here, we've got a beautiful copper bath for a posh jacuzzi to sit into a commune with nature while you clean the mud out your toes.

Gareth Fulton: But even with this, we try and do a bath because it uses less water, and it's more friendly to the, you know, while off around it than having a big hot tub using energy and having to change the water every time the guests change.

Rob Smith: And of course, the whole point of all of this is the fact that this is what pays for that. That these huts, the income you get from that allows you as a business to manage the land for nature.

Gareth Fulton: Yeah, and people, and employ local people as well. And so it's pointless being an island just for wildlife on its own with no engagement because how will people value it and therefore how will it be protected? And so it's all about that balance of people relating and engagement wildlife, which is really important for our health, mental health and physical health as well as society. And so it's engaging local people, whether they want to come and bird watch or be employed. It's engaging people from further afield to get out of cities and have a bit of wellness in nature. And then also for wildlife itself because there's an intrinsic value to all these birds. And if Elmley is not here, there's a huge number of birds without habitat to use.

Rob Smith: And it's a beautiful wild spot. And as we look across here, so just talk me through some of the birds we can see in the whole marsh in front of us.

Gareth Fulton: Yeah. So, just in front of the ponds, we've got lots of wigeon, which are a duck that breeds in the Arctic and winters on the east UK coast. And there's over 10,000 of them here at the moment. So that's a real spectacle to see that many birds in the air, that quantity. A few others got some tufted duck, which are also winter migrants. And then all over the marshes, you can see them fluttering about a lapwing. It's all sort of bellwether bird. We might use the lapwing as the indicator of how to manage the reserve because they're the middle of the food chain. So if we get it right for the lapwing, we're getting it broadly right for that marsh harrier at the top, or the white tailed eagle now at the top, and the invertebrates in the soil which the lapwing feed on. So, they're a really good indicator of a healthy habitat here. And yeah, there are lots of them.

Rob Smith: And as we look out, there's a lot of water that I can see.

Gareth Fulton: Yeah.

Rob Smith: Is that water there year round or is that because the tide is in at the moment or…?

Gareth Fulton: No, that's fresh water. The tide stays the other side of the sea defenses. And that water is basically rainfall. And we sometimes in dry winters pumps in more water on. But we're seasonally drying wetland, so very wet in the winter that attracts and creates habitat for wintering birds. And then what makes it special for breeding ground nesting birds through the spring is that water starts evaporating. And that creates a muddy edge. And it allows the birds to nest and the chicks to have very close proximity to food because they want to be in the muddy bits eating the chironomids and the worms and whatnot. And so that will then almost completely dry out by midsummer. The grass grows and it can be grazed and whatnot.

Rob Smith: And when you say graze, is that sheep, is that cattle? What do you put on there?

Gareth Fulton: Predominantly cattle because they just create the right grass structure for ground nesting birds. So the skylarks, the redshank, the lapwing, they're like an open landscape, but they need tufts of grass to nest in or round. And also that creates the micro diversity for insects, invertebrates and whatnot. So you get a whole…

Rob Smith: And that farming side of it because you know we talked a fair bit about the fact that you're getting people onto to come here and spend their money actually on the site, but the farming side of it, is that an important part financially or is that more important kind of emotionally to how you use the land and how you manage the land?

Gareth Fulton: Yeah, I mean, the primary driver for grazing is for habitat management. And here now we've sort of transitioned to, the farming is hugely important and everyone needs to eat. And we feel that the livestock grazed here are primarily habitat engineers. You know, the grazing of the sward is key for the wildlife interest. But also we want to provide high quality food. And we've got a range of farmers near us who provide livestock to help graze the marshes because there's a lot of cattle out there, you know, six or seven hundred over 3000 acres. And so it's definitely not an individual effort and that those guys are producing really high quality meat that is sustainably produced and ethically produced. So, it's a really important part of it because grazing marshes, and these marshes, it's a beautiful wilderness, but a man-made landscape. And that's a really interesting facet actually of that. Our rewilding scenario is to allow the marshes to go back to salt marsh. But we're in a funny dilemma at the moment where we want more salt marsh, but there's no replacement for the scale of Elmley of the wet, fresh water grazing marshes with all the wildlife interest. So we're trying to balance those two needs. But yeah, the farming element is really important to the wildlife interest. And it's mainly cattle because they do the best job for the sward.

Rob Smith: Also with us was Fiona McKinnon, who's a volunteer warden. She spends much of her time guiding people through the wildlife. And she told me that while she was first interested in the reserve's birds, that soon changed over time.

Fiona McKinnon: So birds started to be, but actually Elmley is so much more than just birds. So it's, as the seasons go through, you move through moss, through amphibians, through dragonflies back to the birds again to the fauna and flora. So, although it might look very flat and very monoculture, actually, it's got this huge richness going through and through the seasons. So there's always something to be excited about.

Rob Smith: Now the thing that we're getting excited about here, we're literally outside the cabin I've just been having a look at. And this twig branch stick that's just hanging over the fence, owls roost here.

Fiona McKinnon: That's right. So one of the things that we're very lucky at Elmley to have is we have four of the five British species of owls here. The only one that we don't have is your tawny owl, because we don't have enough trees, mature trees for this. They're more of a woodland bird. But we have resident barn owls, which are those beautiful white heart-shaped birds that you see sort of romantically going across the farmland. We've got little owls, which were an introduced species from a couple of hundred years ago. We have visiting short-eared owl in the winter and over much of the early spring. And we have a large number of those here this year, up to 30 at the beginning of the winter. And luckily we have long-eared owls that are resident here and have believed bred here in the recent past. So when you come to stay at Elmley, one of the absolute joys is being so close to nature and so close to owls. And here we have a perfect example.

Rob Smith: And as we are looking here under this particular stick, I can see a couple of, probably at least a dozen…

Fiona McKinnon: Owl pellets.

Rob Smith: Pellets. So can you tell from the pellet what kind of owl?

Fiona McKinnon: So, yes, you can, you have to pick them out a bit. And these ones are a bit degraded because of the rain we've had recently. But I would say that these are burnout ones. We've got a pair of nesting burnouts just down the hill in a box down there. And I think they've come up here, they've hunting along the edges of the water and the sort of reed beds, and they're coming back to digest their food. And then the by-product of what they don't want to eat, they don't want to bother digesting, comes back up as a pellet. A bit like a cat's hairball, and that's what we've got here. So these are fascinating. And you can dry them out and you can pick through them and find out what's been eaten and what's around.

Rob Smith: Do you do that yourself from time to time?

Fiona McKinnon: We do, and we do it with the children that come in. We do various children activities and this is one of the favourite ones.

Rob Smith: I bet they love it, don't they?

Fiona McKinnon: They do. They do question to begin with you are actually dissecting poo, which case we have to say, no, this is regurgitating.

Rob Smith: No, this is vomit.

Fiona McKinnon: Yeah, sounds so much better, doesn't it? And it's fascinating. You start seeing small v bones and skulls and maybe even occasionally a little beat, but that's more unusual. Lots of beetles. So in the littler ones that we pick up, we find lots of beetles shells and things like that. So it is really reflecting the food that they're eating, and gives us a good idea of what's around and our small mammal population as well.

Rob Smith: And what time of day would they tend to do that? You know, so if you were staying here, oh look, there's a robin just hopped top on the branch next to us here. So, I mean, you really are right in the nature here, aren't you? So if you were sitting here, would it be in the middle of the night and you wouldn't necessarily see the owl? Or would you actually get to see them?

Fiona McKinnon: Oh, the dusk, they would come in and be here. So if you're sitting quietly having your evening drink and maybe roasting a marshmallow or two, the birds will come incredibly close. They're used to people. As long as people don't go, let the birds come to you, don't go to them. And they will come in. So, you'll be sitting quietly, just a low noise. The birds are used to that and you'll suddenly find them sitting beside you or flying through, looking at you. Last year in summer, we had one of the long-ear owl spent an awful lot of time in the courtyard, where we were just now, hunting for little beetles and things, and people were sitting there having their evening meal. And this beautiful owl, rare British owl will be flying around their heads with occasionally stopping to look at them by sitting on the fence.

Rob Smith: I can see from your face, you quite like it around here.

Fiona McKinnon: I do, yes. I think anyone that spends any time at Elmley falls a little bit in love with the owls and they're very special here.

Rob Smith: Now obviously, not everyone can afford to stay on the site, and even if you did, it would only be as an occasional treat. So what about the rest of us? Well, since the reserve covers some 3,300 acres, the best way is to actually drive through it and to watch the nature out of the car window.

Gareth Fulton: Particularly with the entry road. It's two miles through the…, and as soon as you enter, you're straight into the marshes. And it's unusual element. It's very remote, but it's also dual carriageway access. And so as soon as you're off that fast road, we try to change people's mentality of driving rather than racing along a dual carriageway, it's a gravel road, it's loose a couple of holes, but we do that to slow people down. And then you're straight into the reserve and two-mile sort of sinuous drive through, and the birds will stay incredibly close to the road because they're habituated, they're used to the traffic, the cars going in and out. They'll stay really close because they don't see the shape of a car as a threat. As soon as you get out and they see the human form, they're away. And it's really important that we get that balance, right?

Rob Smith: So, you let everybody know as they come in, you have a little chat with them to let them know, stay in the car, just look out the window. So like a safari if you're going to, I don’t know, woven or one of those kind of places that you don't want to get attacked by a lion. It's not quite the same concept here, but the way to keep the nature and the wildlife happy is for you to stay in the vehicle and just observe it.

Gareth Fulton: Yeah. There's not a lot that will eat you. I guess if you're a small child, you might get taken by the eagle, but no, but I was going to say Serengeti and you said woven, but you know, whatever. I was giving a tour to someone last April, and we came up very early in the morning, right in the middle of, you know, start of the breeding season. And it's probably the highest compliment ever been paid. But they had been to amazing wetland in South America, the Pantanal. And it is sort of half the size of the UK, and it's just unbelievably vast filled with wildlife. And they said that the drive along our road from Kings Hill Farm back up towards the entrance and all, this is when it's packed with breeding waders and they're all calling everywhere and there's harriers and hares everywhere. And they were honestly just said it was as good, if not better than traveling all the way through the Pantanal to see the breeding birds. It was pretty, pretty blown over by that. You can see some teal moving out, the ducks up moving out the back there.

Rob Smith: So as we're driving along here, every couple of hundred yards or so, there's somebody just parked up. This is what people do. You come out and you sit in the car and you guys at the, in case of what's going on.

Gareth Fulton: Yeah, I mean as Fiona said before, look, if you let the wildlife come to you, you see a lot more. And certain people who can regularly sort of like certain spots where they'll get a view and others just see something and can pull over to the side. As long as you're not blocking the road, it's great because you get to stop and enjoy, watch these lapwing just feeding in the field here. There's a curlew just out here, two curlews, actually, just on the…

Rob Smith: Alright, let's just stop here for a moment then we'll turn the engine off.

Gareth Fulton: So yeah, so we've made the curlew bit of a focus in last year or so. We don't have breeding curlew here, but we have a large wintering population, but we've decided that it's worth, we've got such a prolific population of waders because the conditions are right for them that it might make sense to try and establish curlew here as a breeding population because we think they might be quite successful. In the lowlands of the rest of the UK, there's less than 250 pairs left breeding because the habitat's not right. There's too much predation. There's land use impacts with silage cutting or whatever that's making them not produce chicks. They're very long lived. They're really, really just cottoned onto the fact that they're going to be extinct as a low land breeding bird if we don't get a move on help.

So we are helping with rearing eggs relocated from areas in the north, auction malls where they're going to get disturbed or trampled on the Pennine Way on the coastal footpaths. They're moved there, the skylarks just raising the head too there. They're brought down as eggs. We rear them here and then we raise them in pens, and they feed themselves. So we just have to feed them and keep them warm. And once they went, during their adolescent period, once they hatch before they can fly, they sort of imprint on Elmley as being their home. And we know from the other waders that they're very sight faithful, and some of the lapwing who we've ringed and tagged come back to nest within a meter or two of where they were born. And so we're hoping that's the case with curlew, and the conditions, we've got enough insect life for them in the grasslands to feed their young.

Rob Smith: So, how early in that as a program are you?

Gareth Fulton: We had our first breeding season last spring. Those birds, we fledged 32 at 40 eggs, and those birds of which the survival rate won't be high initially, you know, most birds, 50% are lost in the first winter because it's so hard for them in the first winter. But of those birds, we think they're two or three years gestation before they're ready to breed. And so it's that recruitment rate in 2025, 26, 27.

Rob Smith: Right. Okay, so is it curlew that we can see that's out there and doing its thing? You are hopeful that that will be a breeding bird in the next couple of seasons?

Gareth Fulton: Yeah, these two we can see here aren't tagged. Oh, there's lapwing displaying their sign of spring on the marshes that's setting up a territory to say, this is my patch. Amazing. That's a real morale lifter after the long winter. But yeah, those two birds there are wild curlew because they don't have the leg tags on that we would've put on them. So they will move off to probably, could be Finland, could be other parts of Scandinavia to breed. Our birds, we've got two that are GPS tagged and they've joined the local flock, so they will move around the swale, but we're hoping when those birds in April go back up North, autum might remain.

Rob Smith: Well that was great. We've sort of like actually been out and had a proper look around the place. I mean, the weather's not been lovely today, but actually this is perfect, isn't it? When it's like this?

Gareth Fulton: Yeah. I mean, 12 degrees, bit of drizzle. The birds absolutely love it. You think that all those birds that should, you know, breeding the arctic, this is balmy and they've got access to food. So, they're loving it. Hence, the so many are out.

Rob Smith: And when you come onto the site, and we didn't talk about it earlier, but when you come on, you meet Di at the gate, everybody who comes onto the reserve, you have a little conversation with them to tell them how to behave with the cars.

Gareth Fulton: Yeah. So we've got people who come and stay overnight. It might be a couple of nights, and we do events and things as well in the summer, but majority of the people come in the winter, want to see lots of birds, lots of wetland birds and owls and harriers and whatnot. But Elmley is very open exposed site, and so to do that properly, what we've learned is that if we can talk to people at the gate, give them a really warm welcome, give them a maps so they know where they're going, but also us and perhaps stay in their cars along with two-mile entry road, you can kind of do your own birding safari. It just, we find if as soon as you get out the car, the birds fly, they waste energy and then the next people don't really see anything because the birds have moved out of sight. And so it's just about all of our visitors helping each other to have a great time by some really simple steps. But we've just found that management is the best thing for people, but also the best thing for wildlife, and it's a delicate balance to tread.

Rob Smith: And how does it fit in with the other landowners around you? Do you have conversations with them? You know, things are changing in terms of cap is gone away effectively that subsidy, so are other people looking at you and seeing how you are doing it and trying to copy what you're doing here?

Gareth Fulton: Yeah, I mean, I don't want to be too arrogant to say they're all going to copy us, but they probably pick some good bits and ignore some of the mistakes we've made along the way, which everyone does. But yeah, I mean one of my drivers is really, Elmley, it's incredible privilege to sort of help run Elmley and live in this landscape really. And a lot of our neighbours are, you know, still arable farming. There's marshland, there's lots of fruit growing. It's incredibly challenging for farmers at the moment, particularly the fruit growers which are not getting paid what it costs to produce apples. And we get to the shop and it's a South African apple and they're growing Kentish apples next door. It's bonkers, but their future lies in having a blend of and probably more environmentally friendly practices around their food production because we still need to eat, right?

So they still need to be there, but we we're sort of getting together as a cluster of farms along the whole swale estuary to try and solve these challenges together. It's not a sort of, oh, come and look at Elmley and do all do this because everyone's situation's different and the habitats are different. But by working together or each finding a path through and helping each other probably helped that transition. And lots of people are now looking really seriously at how they change their landscapes around them with their farms or larger holdings to do more for wildlife. We've gone from having a wonderful reserve and landscape, but with employing two people and no visitor interaction or facilities at all, you know, we've set up a community interest company which is a not-for-profit, which has enabled day visitor to continue because without it, there would've been no funding at all.

We don't get any funding to be open to the public or any of that. So that's enabled it. We've got 850 friends of Elmley who are regulars who come all the time. And we've sustained sort of 20,000 other day visitors as a year, which is great. We can now sleep 28-30 people throughout the year, in the summer, some more, year round and a team of 25 people employed locally. And I think that's one of the most amazing things is some of the guys who live in Rushenden and Queenborough, and Minster on the island didn't even know Elmley existed. But now their career and their future is linked and they come to work every day in an amazing place and love it. And I have linked into the marshes which they just find incredible.

Rob Smith: And on a personal level, do you quite like it?

Gareth Fulton: Yeah, I do love it. I mean, Monday for example, is so special, bright blue sky, winter birds, the highest tide of the year, six half meter tides and the marsh full with 45,000 birds. And if you can't be moved by that, you're pretty cold heart. So Yeah. No, I love it.

Rob Smith: Many thanks to Gareth Fulton and Fiona McKinnon for giving us so much time in showing us around the Elmley Nature Reserve. If you want to find out any more about what they do there, then elmleynaturereserve.co.uk is the place to look. If you subscribe and become a friend of Elmley and hundreds of people do, then it's effectively a year-long season ticket. So you can then come and go as often as you like and watch the landscape change through the seasons. Just a couple of little advisory notes though, if you do want to visit, do be aware that the reserve is close to the public on Mondays and Tuesdays, so don't drive out there without checking first. And secondly, no dogs are allowed, even well-behaved ones, even on a lead because making sure that the wildlife is left as undisturbed as possible is their highest priority.