Farm

Home to a wonderful variety of traditional and rare breed livestock and poultry, our farm and its animals hold a very real place at the heart of the Heligan experience.

Recently awarded Rare Breed Farm Park status by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, The Lost Gardens of Heligan are home to the first rare breeds park in the whole of the South West and one of just 23 in the United Kingdom!

We manage our farmland using a mixture of traditional breeds and sustainable, low intensity techniques like the ones practiced here for centuries. Meet our North Devons, White Park and Highland cattle, Kerry Hill, along with Devon and Cornwall Longwool sheep - all of whom were potentially kept here over a hundred years ago. Wander through traditional hay meadows brimming with butterflies and swallows in the summer, and dried to feed our cattle in the winter.

Adventure around the fields and woodland and try to spot our pigs where they are able to forage for nuts and roots and also our native black bee, can you find the queen in the observation hive?

The Poultry Orchard is home to traditional breeds of chicken, ducks and geese, free to roam beneath old varieties of Cornish apple trees and not forgetting the turkeys.....

Our sensitive land management enables you to get up close to the land, encouraging the growth of a learning process about where our food comes from and how we work in harmony with natural habitats and native wildlife.

Our mixture of native livestock breeds reside at Heligan to sensitively manage our grasslands through a regenerative grazing rotation.

We are proud to be actively part of the RBST’s conservation breeding programme of many of our breeds and are committed to raising awareness, and numbers of these native animals. With a livestock events programme in its third year, we aim to get our visitors up close to our animals and to meet other local breed societies and dedicated breeders, so to educate, entertain and enable our visitors to get to know more about Home Farm and its residents.

Some of our stock is eventually produced for the Heligan Kitchen, providing outdoor reared, pedigree meat for our visitor to enjoy.

We are Red Tractor accredited.

Here is a list of the Rare Breeds you can expect to see at The Lost Gardens of Heligan:

Pigs

Berkshire

Cattle

Highland cows

North Devon Cattle (Red Rubys)

Sheep

Devon and Cornwall Long Wool

Herdwick ewes

Jacobs