At a glance
Date: 16 October 2024
Format: In-person meeting, open to all cluster-area landholders
Funded by: High Weald National Landscape Farming in Protected Landscapes (FiPL) scheme, via the Upper Medway & Shovelstrode Catchment Group project
Attendance: Well attended across the cluster area
What we talked about
The meeting was one of the central gatherings of the Upper Medway & Shovelstrode Catchment Group project. Sessions covered:
- The case for coordinated, catchment-scale land management
- Practical experience from the project's first year of deer-management coordination across boundaries
- Water at catchment scale — ghyll stream behaviour, natural flood management, and how upstream decisions affect downstream land
- Hedgerow and woodland-edge management for habitat connectivity
- A frank conversation about what a longer-term, durable cluster structure might look like
What came out of it
The most important outcome was not any single decision taken on the day. It was the shared recognition, across a room of landholders who had not previously worked together formally, that there was real appetite to continue the work beyond the FiPL funding window. Specifically:
- A working understanding that deer management, water management and biodiversity work all benefit from operating at the scale of the catchment, not the farm.
- Initial alignment on five core activity areas that would later become the pillars of the CIC's community interest statement.
- Agreement to explore incorporation as a Community Interest Company as the right structure to hold funding, contracts and partnerships on behalf of the group.
This meeting, together with others in the same winter series, is what made the case for the CIC. The Upper Medway Land Stewards Cluster CIC was incorporated in February 2026 with five directors drawn from cluster members.
What this set up
Many of the activities now carried forward by the CIC trace back to conversations in this room:
- Continued coordinated deer management across boundaries
- A collective approach to funding applications under SFI, private natural-capital schemes and successor grants
- Habitat connectivity planning at cluster scale — now formalised as one of the five CIC activity areas
- Regular cluster events — which this page is one of the first of in the new archive
Archive note: this write-up was compiled after the fact from meeting notes and participant recollection. Where possible, future event write-ups will be prepared closer to the date with photographs and a simple outcomes list.