The Dart with a Pinch of Salt Marsh

Take a walk along Longmarsh, go right to the end, and you will see a muddy inlet.
It’s not beautiful, and it’s easily overlooked, but it is part of a fragile eco system of huge importance. The salt marsh.

The upper Dart estuary is the focus of a restoration scheme which will protect and enhance the inter-tidal slivers of riverbank most of us sail or walk right by.

These pockets of salt marsh are natural wonders. Storing carbon, home to insects and plants, hunting grounds for birds, the marshes are vital.

Yet like so much of our environment they are being degraded by pollution in rivers, washes of boats, sea level rise and intrusive development.

An Environment Agency (EA) report in January 2023 said an estimated 85% of England’s salt marshes have disappeared since the 1800s.

The Salt marsh Project is a partnership with the EA, the Duchy of Cornwall (which owns the riverbed up to the foreshore), the Dart Harbour and Navigation Authority and a local group called the Bioregional Learning Centre.

Jane Brady co-founded the South Devon BLC in 2017.

“The significance of this partnership for us is that it elevates the role of a Community Interest Company in restoring a constellation of saltmarsh clusters to health,” she said.

So what is a bioregion?

It’s a concept, growing worldwide, which suggests that rather than think of a region as a district council, with man made constituencies and political borders, we should regard a particular natural landscape as a region. South Devon’s bioregion is bounded by its great rivers, the Tamar, the Teign and the Dart.

It is a distinct place – for example, drive over Haldon Hill to Exeter and you know instinctively that you are somewhere else, Jane said.

The BLC has gathered artists, ecologists, kyakers, land managers, boat owners and others who have invested their skills and time to raise awareness of the Dart and salt marsh.

“Most of what we do is build capacity in civil society to help protect our bioregion,” Jane explained.

Paul Britton, Harbour Master, said the authority will be leading the practical side of the project, providing their staff, boats, and equipment to work alongside scientists and volunteers.

The Dart estuary is a ria, or drowned river valley, created as sea levels rose after the last ice age. The long, winding estuary has steep sided woody banks and rias such as this are found only in northwest Europe. Within that, the marshes on the Dart are a unique landscape feature.