Wilderness: Chapter 7
The Wilding: In which we turn back time and learn about rewilding
This is the seventh chapter in Wilderness: In Search of Belonging. This is my story, about my search for belonging and about seeking solace in nature by rewilding a forgotten fragment of Somerset.
We walk through an arch built of bone-grey antlers. The dried heads of teasels knock against the tines and clouds of thistle-down drift on the breeze. It is as if we have stepped back in time, to an era before we were born: flocks of goldfinches shrill and twitter; turtle doves coo and nightingales sing from the depths of dense blackthorn hedges.
The light is the colour of syrup; we enter what feels like an African savannah, sun-gold with fleabane and the yellow-brick-road yellow of ragwort. Heads snap up from the bleached-blonde grass: a herd of fallow deer, the males with impressive, flat-bladed antlers. A little further and there’s an extended family of Tamworth pigs, the same rust-ginger as the stalks of dried sorrel seeds they’re rooting beneath, their snouts coated in mud. We squeeze through a gap in a hedge and come face to face with a Longhorn cow, chocolate-brown and white with monstrous horns, set slightly askew. It snuffs and backs away in fright.
I had booked Jaimie and me on a Small Scale Rewilding Workshop at Knepp in Sussex, the former dairy estate originally run by Isabella Tree and her husband, Charlie Burrell. It’s August 2020, and miraculously, for a brief window, lockdown has ended and we’re allowed to travel. It’s the first course that will be held in person. Children aren’t allowed, so we’ve just done a mammoth round trip from Somerset to drop our daughter off with my brother’s family in London, before heading to Knepp. We’ve carted our luggage from the car park in a wheelbarrow through a field to ‘Exmoor’, a military-green shepherd’s hut tucked into a small wood. But instead of settling in, we’re taking a sunset stroll through the fallow fields.
Semi-wild herbivores - Exmoor ponies, Longhorn cattle, Tamworth pigs and three types of deer roam the 3,500 acre estate. We hadn’t expected to see them so soon or so close to the camp site. We walk further, through a mosaic of habitats: swampy green streams, flower-rich fields, thick scrub, ancient woodland, and emerge in a wide, flat meadow with a giant oak tree in the centre. Circling the tree are great white birds. Storks.
Storks once bred in Britain and have been here for over 360,000 years. In fact, there’s a village nine miles from Knepp, originally called Estorchestone (now Storrington) meaning ‘the village of the storks’ in Saxon. in 2016 Knepp started a reintroduction programme and this summer was the first that the storks had flown free and begun to breed. As the sun starts to set, we sit in the long grass and watch the storks’ messy, bundle-of-sticks, nests, as the parents bring worms and insects back to the chicks, clattering their red bills, before flying low over the canopy. It’s if we have returned to the Jurassic.
It might be no coincidence that Knepp feels savannah-like. Charlie Burrell grew up in Africa, and this kind of open grassland and wood pasture is familiar to him. After the death-knell sounded on his dairy business, he wanted to encourage nature to return to Knepp, but with a less-goal oriented approach than conservationists traditionally adopt.
Knepp, could, for instance, be a prime habitat for corncrakes, cranes, osprey, hedgehogs, and red-backed shrike, and normally conservationists manage land specifically for a particular species. But as Isabella quickly realises and points out in her book, Wilding, we don’t really know what habitat is suitable for certain species because we’re seeing them, not thriving, but clinging on, where and how they can.
Instead, Charlie and Isabella wanted to try, ‘letting go - allowing nature to take over. It’s about sitting on your hands, with no expectations, and seeing what turns up’ And as they say:
‘The arrivals are often surprising. No one could have predicted at the outset of the project, for example, that we would become one of the most important sites in Britain for turtle doves and nightingales. Or that we would have ravens, peregrine falcons, and Bechstein’s and barbastelle bats here within just a few years…
Nature, we are learning, is often far more resilient than we give it credit for. Hedgehogs disappeared in our last decade of intensive farming but recently seem to be making a comeback on their own. Ospreys have not bred here yet, but are occasional visitors. Rare beetles are on the increase and water-violets have already begun to spread through our watercourses. We believe it will only be a matter of time before we see our first greater horseshoe bat here, flying in from territory not far away in Midhurst.’