About Fat Hen & Caroline Davey About Fat Hen's Chefs TV | Press | Testimonials Fat Hen Slideshow Wild Plant & Fungi Slideshow Wild Food Recipes Education & Research Code Of Conduct Useful Links Terms & Conditions Gift Vouchers & Merchandise Seashore forage at Gwynver Beach Cows in the Penwith landscape West Penwithian woodland

WEST CORNWALL'S SEMI-WILD LANDSCAPE | back West Cornwall's beautiful and rugged coastline is within a stone's throw of Fat Hen. We are ideally located right in the middle of the West Penwith peninsula within several miles of every conceivable shoreline both on the north and south coasts, our nearest beaches being Sennen and Gwynver on the Atlantic coast.      Gwynver Beach                                                                                   Caroline foraging on Gwynver Beach The seashore is one of the most productive habitats there is for wild food. It's not just seaweeds and shellfish you can collect from the shoreline but a diverse range of herbs, salads, flowers, seeds, vegetables and fungi. The habitats on the upper beach and coastal cliffs provide a diverse wild food resource. If you were to try to live on wild food alone, it is to the seashore you should go. West Cornwall has retained small field systems that, in some places, date back to the Iron Age. The whole peninsula is a network of bridleways and footpaths with fields bounded by ancient Cornish hedges which are fantastic for wildlife and provide a very good larder for the forager.      Iron Age field systems, West Penwith                                           Boscawen-un stone circle Our foraging trips from Fat Hen take us by foot along some of these ancient green lanes and include dropping into the Boscawen-un stone circle, just a 5 minute walk from Fat Hen. The riot of colour we see down this lane in Spring is nature at its best. The majestic pink foxgloves, bowing bluebells, the stately green ferns, the vibrant sunny gorse flowers and the white spray of cow parsley produce a chaos of colour perfectly in balance. In autumn this same lane is full to the brim with edible fruits: blackberries, sloes, elderberries and haws. Organic market gardens and arable fields in West Cornwall provide a great range of edible agricultural weeds. Many of these plants were once cultivated crops that went out of fashion or were selectively bred to produce varieties with higher yields. Yet, the seed bank of these ancient weeds remains in the soil and they grow wherever they get the chance - usually on the bare ploughed soil around the edges of these fields. We harvest salads, roots and vegetables from these habitats. Woodland, another important habitat for wild food completes the natural larder available to the forager. Fungi, salads, pignuts, nuts and berries are all available in West Cornwall's woodlands. In the autumn, foraging trips to both coniferous and broad-leaved woodland are planned specifically to look for edible fungi. back

Location & Contact : Fat Hen, Gwenmenhir, Boscawen-noon Farm, St Buryan, Penzance, Cornwall TR19 6EH | Tel. 01736 810156 | caroline@fathen.org