More about Robin Bowman

Robin has run nature connection, wilderness skills and awareness events and camps with a variety of organisations, charities and schools for over 20 years. He shares his skills, knowledge and experience with deeply engaging stories, an infectious passion for nature and playful humour.

Having completed the Trackways yearcourse in 2007 he has been an integral part of the Art of Mentoring and 8 Shields movement since its inception in the UK. Robin has worked with Wildwise for many years, facilitating on their ‘Call of the Wild’ environmental education program. He also runs Hunger Games themed camps for teenagers, describing this as a Trojan horse of nature connection regarding the unexpected depth of belonging that they gain from their experience. For the charity Write to Freedom, he has worked with young prisoners and recovering adult addicts in the outdoors.

Many moons ago Robin was one of the founding members of Landmatters Permaculture Community, where he lived for six years in a bender he made out of hazel. He now lives with his young family in the middle of Dartmoor running a smallholding. He is passionate about providing protein and food for his family's dinner table and loves nothing more than fishing, foraging and hunting for food on the estuary, coastlines and woodlands of Devon.

Robin’s lifelong love of nature and wildlife, beginning with a fascination with birds as a child, has called him to the very cutting edge of the rewilding movement in Britain. He teaches on the subject at Embercombe and Schumacher as well as The Old Way Immersion. He now manages a 120 acre woodland called Moor Barton Wilding, home to a family of beavers, a white fallow stag and a huge diversity of birdlife from goshawks to whitethroats. Moor Barton is a venue for organisations to run educational camps, to rewild people and for the land to rewild itself. The Moor Barton Steering Group, founded by Robin, runs several volunteer weekends a year to assist the land in increasing biodiversity.

Robin co-founded The Old Way with Emily Fawcett in 2017 and was instrumental in the design of the Immersion journey which follows the old route from the Moor, along the River to the Coast and back. Together they took the first Old Way groups out to Namibia to learn alongside the Ju/Hoansi San bushmen, at their invitation. Since then Robin has worked closely with the San Master Trackers and Louis Liebenburg, founder of Cybertracker, to create a livelihood based on their ancient knowledge of tracking, hunting and gathering. Robin now runs similar expeditions to the Kalahari independently of The Old Way. Please visit trackingthekalahari.org for more details of upcoming trips.