Robin Bowman
Robin has run nature connection, wilderness skills and awareness events, courses and camps with a variety of organisations, charities and schools for over 20 years. He shares his skills, knowledge and experience with deeply engaging stories, an infectious passion for nature and playful humour.
Woodsman, tracker, and birder, Robin is an ardent advocate of rewilding both the land and ourselves . He has founded a variety of projects (see below) and acts as advisor to a number of different wildlife charities and organisations.
Robin’s lifelong love of nature and wildlife, beginning with a fascination with birds as a child, has called him to the very cutting edge of the rewilding movement in Britain. He teaches on the subject at Embercombe and Schumacher, an international college for ecological studies as well as on The Old Way which he co-founded with Emily Fawcett in 2017. Robin was instrumental in the design of the The Old Way year long immersion journey which follows the old route from the Moor, along the River to the Coast and back. Robin and Emily took the first groups out to Namibia to learn alongside the Ju/Hoansi San bushmen, at their invitation.
Having completed the Trackways year course in 2007 he has been an integral part of the Art of Mentoring and 8 Shields movement since its inception in the UK. Robin has worked with Wildwise for many years, facilitating on their ‘Call of the Wild’ environmental education program.
Robin also runs Hunger Games themed wilderness skills camps for teenagers, describing this as a Trojan horse of nature connection regarding the unexpected depth of belonging that the young adults gain from their experience. For the charity Write to Freedom, Robin has worked with young prisoners and recovering adult addicts in the outdoors.
Robin manages a 120 acre woodland called Moor Barton Wilding, an ecological restoration initiative. Added to the cuckoos, nightjars and goshawks, a white fallow buck and a huge diversity of plant, animal and bird life, the project has now reintroduced beavers - the first on Dartmoor for hundreds of years. Moor Barton is a venue for organisations to run educational camps, to rewild people and for the land to rewild itself. The Moor Barton Steering Group, founded by Robin, runs several volunteer weekends a year to assist the land in increasing biodiversity.
Many moons ago Robin was one of the founding members of Landmatters Permaculture Community, where he lived for six years in a bender he made out of hazel. He now lives with his young family in the middle of Dartmoor running a smallholding. Robin is passionate about providing protein and food for his family's dinner table and loves nothing more than fishing, foraging and hunting for food on the estuary, coastlines and woodlands of Devon.