Back to Nature
A radical project at Knepp Castle shows that what wildlife needs is space
Fiona Reynolds at Knepp Castle
The deer watched me, the cattle ignored me and the pigs kept out of sight
I’VE seen abundance and it’s good. At the time insects should be most visible —flying, splattering our windscreens and getting in our eyes and ears—all we hear is evidence that populations of butterflies, bees and bugs are crashing around us.
My mother recalls clouds of butterflies as a child and our garden was full of cabbage whites and tortoiseshells when I was young. Today, we exclaim when we see our first (solitary) brimstone, marbled white and red admiral of the year.
What are we doing about it? There’s a mix of reasons for their decline, including habitat loss, intensive farming, pesticides, new roads and housing estates. Just as bad is our compulsive tidying of patches of neglected woodland edge, old meadow or playground corners that used to be full of wildflowers and, as a result, insects. We’ve systematically, if accidentally, wiped out the wrinkles and crinkles that gave places character and provided refuges for wildlife.
One place I’ve longed to visit has taken a radically different view and is equally systematically and determinedly giving wildlife new spaces, on a grand scale. This is Knepp, the 3,500-acre family estate of the Burrells, near Horsham in West Sussex. I’ve been reading about it for years (‘Is it time to run wild?’, COUNTRY LIFE, March 30, 2016, and Book Reviews, May 2, 2018) so was eager to explore it.
My walk began an hour after dawn and I followed Charlie Burrell’s advice to take footpaths from Knepp Castle to the bridge south of Hammer Farm, then to wander freely within the enclosed ‘southern block’ of the reclaimed landscape. In two hours, I covered about six miles, circling in a big, anticlockwise loop on farm tracks and paths through the rewilded estate, each step a revelation and each view a treat.
I wasn’t sure how I’d react to it. I’m passionate about cultural landscapes and I value the hand of humans in the places we’ve created. We also need to produce food, although we need to do much better to deliver conservation as well.
What Charlie and Issy Burrell have done is different. Their estate was failing agriculturally, which is why—in a managed way—they turned it into a massive conservation project. It’s still a cultural landscape, however: herds of longhorn cattle, an ancient English breed, roam freely, native Exmoor ponies and fallow deer graze, creating lawns, and a posse of Tamworth pigs performs the vital task of surface ploughing.
The estate produces high-quality meat and earns income from visitors as eager as I am to see what they’ve done. And, in turning from corn to grazing, an exciting abundance of shrubs and young trees interspersed with flower-studded pastureland, water-logged meadows and forest glades has been created.
Of course, it’s the presence of grazing animals that keeps the landscape open, in turn enabling such a diversity of wildlife, but what’s remarkable is how quickly the land has been recolonised. Species that are rare in England—the turtle dove, purple emperor butterfly and nightingale—are now recorded here in abundance, challenging views about the habitats they need. What they really need is space.
Walking here was so different from my normal experience. I was immersed in a cacophony of birdsong, so loud it all but drowned out the soft trilling of a turtle dove; I waded through boggy meadows and negotiated thighhigh thistles. From a distance, the deer watched me thoughtfully, the cattle studiously ignored me and the pigs kept out of sight.
Returning to the castle for breakfast, I felt inspired. Knepp shows how we can make space for Nature by working with the ruminants that have accompanied humans for centuries, how we could create networks of such sites among a more wildlife-rich farmed landscape and how we can create new cultural landscapes that will bring abundance and joy to our Nature-deprived lives.