Welcoming the Winterbourne

Lance Turner is a volunteer lookerer at Southerham and Malling Down nature reserves, keeping an eye on our sheep and lambs, cattle and goats. He's volunteered on our Hit Squads at Ashdown Forest and Southerham. He also runs Intrepid Productions, a community theatre company, which has been working in Lewes schools on a creative project, Welcoming the Winterbourne.

You can listen to it by following this link.

Welcoming the Winterbourne featured at the fantastic Winterbourne Festival organised by the Love Our Ouse project in March this year, and involves some lovely storytelling, as well as explanations of what the Winterbourne is and why chalk streams are so unusual, important and interesting as habitats. There's music, a lovely use of words such as 'percolating' and 'aquifer' - it talks about the stream 'bounding its way through Lewes'.

I asked Lance to tell me more about the project.

'I was walking along the Winterbourne with a friend who was telling me about it - and I'd not realised what a chalk stream was, how rare a habitat it is, or indeed that the one in Lewes is called the Winterbourne because the water is only present during winter. So the idea of a project about it arose. I liked that it focussed on a very specific type of river, and a local one, not just 'rivers' in general. Chalk streams support a particular kind of biodiversity and are located only in a few places.

I approached a number of people and clicked with Natasha Padbury (of Love Our Ouse), who was in the process of creating the Winterbourne Festival. She included my proposed project in the application to Changing Chalk, and we were lucky enough to be granted funding to go ahead.

We did the audio recording at Starfish Studios (who promote young people's music). We were working with a great group of year four and fives from Western Road Primary School. I wrote the narration, the children wrote the poetry and they also devised the plays in small groups. The whole process took about ten weeks.

We were really pleased with how it came out. The children did so well at bringing the story of the Winterbourne to life, and it was wonderful to be part of the Winterbourne Festival this year.'

The next schools projects planned by Intrepid are Wonderful Woodlands and My Voice in Nature. You can find out more here 

Welcoming the Winterbourne schools project was a partnership between Love our Ouse and Intrepid Productions as part of the Winterbourne Festival in March 2025. Generously supported by the National Trust and the Changing Chalk Community Grants Scheme, and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, with thanks to National Lottery Players.