A festival celebrating the local environment and encouraging people to take action ensuring its protection is coming to Kingsbridge this week.

The community festival, which lasts for four days, will be taking place from Thursday June 15th to Sunday June 18th, and is bringing people together to learn about local wildlife, connect to nature and find out how they can help the environment. The festival is supported by a variety of local organisations such as Devon Wildlife Trust, Seadream Education, Till the Coast is Clear and Harbour House Centre for Arts and Yoga.

Across the four days will be a wide variety of nature inspired events and activities including talks, film screenings, nature walks, forest school, yoga, woodland tours, quizzes, art workshops, wildlife activities and nature exploration, crafts, wildlife spotting canoe trips and even some wild parkour.

Kingsbridge-based Community Artist Shelley Castle is one of the organisers of the festival. She said of the event:

“Kingsbridge Nature Festival is the first of its kind for our town and surrounding area - and we very much hope that it will be the first of many to come. We are so lucky to live in a beautiful area full of abundant wildlife - the sea, our estuary (actually a Ria) and rolling hills with pockets of woodland. There are some unusual and threatened species living nearby, but for many of us we are not aware of them.   The festival hopes to bring some of them to our attention and into our hearts!  For example, did you know there are seahorses living in the estuary in some fantastic patches of seagrass?  Seagrass is a big carbon sink, and seahorses are the only creature in the world where the male is the one to give birth.

Shelley hopes that the festival will encourage people to take more of an active role in helping the environment: “ Kingsbridge Nature Festival will celebrate what we have but also help us find ways to support a big boom in local biodiversity over the coming years.  With a huge array of different events on offer, we hope there is something for everyone.”

The festival will include a community picnic on Saturday June 17th on the Recreation Ground, so visitors are invited to bring their lunch and a rug in celebration of the local environment.