volunteering
Get your hands dirty. Make a difference.
Get your hands dirty. Make a difference.
Volunteering at East Shallowford Farm is a beautifully varied experienced. You'll be out on Dartmoor, working alongside a small passionate team, doing things that genuinely matter - to the farm, to the land and to the young people who come here.
Whether you come once or every week, there's a place for you here.
Why volunteer at Shallowford?
Volunteering opportunities at Shallowford are varied and change with the seasons.
You might find yourself:
- Tending the kitchen garden - planting, harvesting, weeding and watering
- Helping with farm maintenance and conservation tasks
- Supporting school and youth group visits
- Joining a community volunteer day
- Sharing a skill or expertise with the team
- Helping out at farm events throughout the year
No experience is necessary for most roles.
Just enthusiasm and a willingness to get stuck in.
What's involved?
Some of the best things young people learn at Shallowford come from people who are willing to share what they know.
If you have a practical skill, craft, trade or area of experience that you’d love to pass on, come and take a walk around the farm with Emily. We can explore where your skills might fit into the programme and whether there’s a useful way for you to get involved.
You don’t need to arrive with a fully formed idea.
Sometimes it starts with a conversation, a walk around the farm and seeing what sparks.
Share what you know
Our Tuesday Garden Club runs weekly from 9am to 1pm as a drop-in session.
The kitchen garden is one of the most loved corners of Shallowford Farm. It's where the young people who visit us learn to sow seeds, harvest vegetables and understand where their food actually comes from. Keeping it thriving year-round takes more hands than our small team has on its own - and that's where the Garden Club comes in.
Depending on the season, you might be sowing seeds in the polytunnel, planting out seedlings, harvesting whatever the garden has to offer, weeding between the rows, watering on dry summer mornings or preparing the beds for the season ahead.
The Garden Club has built a community of its own over time. A small group of regulars who turn up week after week, work alongside each other, share knowledge and enjoy being outdoors doing something purposeful. New faces are always welcome. You don't need any gardening experience. You just need to want to be there.
Tea and biscuits provided. Always.
tuesday garden club
East Shallowford Farm is home to one of Dartmoor's most remarkable and threatened wild inhabitants - the Marsh Fritillary butterfly.
The farm’s rhos pasture, the wet valley grassland that runs through the West Webburn valley, provides exactly the kind of habitat the Marsh Fritillary needs to thrive. But understanding how well the population is doing, and how best to support it, requires both careful monitoring and ongoing habitat management.
That’s where our citizen science and conservation volunteers come in.
We’re building a team of volunteer surveyors to monitor Marsh Fritillary populations across ten sites along the River Webburn. You don’t need any prior knowledge of butterflies or ecology to take part. Just curiosity and a willingness to spend time out on the moor.
Surveys are always done in groups, so you’ll never be out on Dartmoor alone. The programme runs from late spring through to early autumn, with training days in August and survey days in August and September.
As the seasons change, the work continues. During autumn and winter, volunteers also help with practical habitat management to protect and improve the grassland the Marsh Fritillary depends on.
It’s important conservation work, and it takes place in one of the most beautiful corners of Dartmoor. You’ll need to be 16 or over, reasonably physically fit given the remote locations involved, and available on weekdays for survey days.
Citizen science
"Around that table, sharing meals, laughing, learning and working alongside people from completely different backgrounds, I experienced something very special."
- Hadas Hagos, Waste Not Want Not Battersea
Thanks! We've received your enquiry and will be in touch as soon as we can.
Speak soon.
The Team at Shallowford
