Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
My wildest investment yet
Deborah Meaden tells how turning her 26-acre Somerset property back over to nature has reaped rich rewards
Besides Peter Jones, she’s the longestserving member of the Dragons’ Den panel. She’s invested in the most ventures and is said to have a fortune of £40 million. But Deborah Meaden’s most gratifying investment has been the rewilding of her Somerset home, a former farmhouse surrounded by 26 acres, once owned by 18th-century prime minister William Pitt the Elder. ‘Somerset is in my DNA,’ says Deborah, 61. ‘I was born there and have lived there most of my life.’
She moved back to the county in 1996 with her husband Paul to a Georgian house at the foot of the Quantock Hills then bought the farm ‘our house ten years later. adored cat Samson had just died and I said to Paul that I couldn’t bear being in the house without his presence. We went for a drive and that’s when we saw this place.
‘It was part of an arable smallholding, and the farmer still farms beyond what is now our property. We found ourselves living in a beautiful, rural area near the Somerset Levels. It’s in the middle of nowhere with the darkest nights you can imagine. I love it.’
As Deborah points out, a farmer has different priorities to a domestic householder. ‘There were lots of metal barns everywhere but we sensed that the farmhouse could be turned into a lovely home and the land – more or less covered in pesticides for farming reasons – could be returned to nature, if we let it.’
So she couldn’t be more enthusiastic about the annual Weekend Wilding life Census, the biggest survey of its kind in Britain, now in its second year. ‘I can’t think of a better way of tracking wildlife than by asking people the length and breadth of the land,’ says Deborah.
The Meadens didn’t move into their new home for 18 months while the agricultural buildings were dismantled and an electrical substation with its overhead wires was buried. ‘When you look out now, you don’t see electric pylons. Our intention was to let it all live and breathe naturally.’
The management of the land when the farm was fully operational had forced the wildlife to the very edges of it. ‘We decided to let it go back to the wild and see what impact that had,’ says Deborah. There’s no harm in givnature
a helping hand, though. ‘We planted scores of trees – mature lime and oak, birch, hazel and plane. We bought hundreds of saplings, investing in native local species like willow, which does well along with dogwood, blackthorn and hawthorn. Our theory is if we plant something and it thrives, all well and good. If it dies, it probably wasn’t meant to be there. We quickly changed the landscape.’ It also revolutionised the wildlife that Deborah and Paul share the land with. ‘Not long after we moved in, I can clearly remember watching a solitary swallow sitting on the one remaining electric wire between two buildings. Now, particularly in summer, there are hundreds of swifts and swallows and house martins swooping through the sky.’
Regular avian visitors include the green woodpecker (‘which I mistook for a parrot the other day’), the greenfinch, the mistle thrush (‘which spends a lot of time smashing snails’), dunnocks and blackbirds. ‘There are plenty of starlings, too. People don’t like them because they’re aggressive, but they’re smart. It’s survival of the fittest.’
As for robins, Deborah says it’s a myth that there’s only one per garden. ‘We have robins that share this land. Yes, there’ll be a dominant one, but that doesn’t mean he won’t co
habit.’ There are also blue tits, house sparrows and goldfinches a-plenty. ‘There are plenty of wrens with their beautiful song, too. They’re so tiny, I marvel that they survive the winter.’
Three years ago, the Meadens took the advice of a local and stopped having their hedgerows cut back at the end of summer. ‘Just when the berries started coming out, when the deer and the mice start fattening themselves up for winter, we’d had it all cut away.
‘I was staggered at how soon word got around the local wildlife that we were leaving it alone. Our friend, a wildlife photographer called Simon Ting, said that of course word spread quickly in the animal kingdom. Now we’re a little oasis.’
There’s also a sizeable pond that has attracted otters, wild ducks, even eels. And, of course, herons, the enemy of the fish. ‘We’ve also got tawny owls, little owls, two barn owls and kestrels, all a good indicator that there are plenty of small creatures to be hunted, voles and mice and so on.
‘There are sparrowhawks, which everyone but me hates. It’s not uncommon to find a decapitated pigeon, its head bitten off by a hawk. But animals kill animals. It’s the circle of life. You know when a sparrowhawk flies on to our land: there’s a chorus of anguish from the birds, alerting one another. I’ve seen birds of all species fly into a lime tree to flush a sparrowhawk out and away.’
A few years ago Deborah adopted a black Welsh mountain sheep called Clyde, along with three rescued white sheep. There’s a former racehorse called Just Bert, plus Jet who used to be her riding horse and their stablemates William, Fred and Wells. ‘They pass the day munching grass and providing compost for the garden. I still ride as much as I can on a couple of horses that I keep at my sister’s house half an hour away.’
Surrounded by abundant wildlife, Deborah doesn’t usually have a favourite. ‘But today my heart goes out to a rather bedraggled pheasant that was almost certainly chased on to the roof, slid down the tiles and landed in the pond where I found it half-drowning. I’ve got him wrapped up in a towel in one of the chicken houses and I’m giving him food and water until he gets warm and dry again.’
Like many Weekend readers, Deborah has a cornucopia of butterflies and moths. She can tick off holly blues, small tortoiseshells, speckled woods, small whites and, occasionally, peacocks. ‘Last summer we had a proliferation of beautiful painted ladies. We used to see cinnabar and garden tiger moths but not for a long time. We were inundated with lime hawk-moths a couple of years ago.’
Because there’s quite a bit of water around, the property attracts frogs and toads plus slow worms and grass snakes. Deborah swims against the tide in her love of snakes, adders in particular. ‘As a little girl, running in the long grass, I remember my mother shouting, “Watch out for adders.” They’re beautiful but terribly shy. They do their darnedest to get out of your way before you tread on them. Their bite is unlikely to kill a human but we pay for anti-venom at the vets since it could kill a dog, for example.’
As for freshwater invertebrates, there are plenty of dragonflies, as well as water boatmen and azure damselflies. Of the regular invertebrates, there are seven-spot ladybirds and red-tailed bumblebees, marmalade hoverflies and craneflies. Green shield bugs proliferate, and the badgers enjoy the earthworms. There’s no shortage of lacewings and violet ground beetles.
Typically, Deborah has forthright views on badger culls. ‘I’m not a fan. If you’re going to take out 75 per cent of a species, your science needs to be pretty damn solid. They don’t cause us any problems, but we’re fortunate to have enough space that they build their setts away from the house.’
Then there are the foxes. ‘Go out after dark, shine a torch and you’ll catch a couple of eyes staring back at you. We hear them all the time. We keep our chickens as safe as we can but we have lost a few to foxes. The fox has to live. Nature red in tooth and claw. Isn’t that what they say?
‘We’ve got moles, voles and bats, including the common pipistrelle. Paul has a device on his phone that listens to the sound of the bat then identifies the species. We didn’t have any squirrels until the trees took serious root a couple of years ago. We’ve always had stoats, but funnily enough I’ve never seen a hedgehog or a weasel.’
Roe deer regularly cross their land. ‘I’m happy for them to eat all the lovely berries in our hedges. If you go out in the morning you can see indentations in the grass where the deer have slept. We leave our grass long in the winter because it’s also home to mice and moles – I call them grasslings – and it provides a little protection for them at a more challenging time of the year.’
Deborah, as you can tell, is a champion of all creatures great and small. ‘Everything has qualities to admire. Mine is a very pragmatic approach and in a way I’m being selfish. I want to look out on this amazing array of wildlife. I see hares boxing each other in the grass and it brings me pure joy.
‘So for me there’s no alternative but to create an environment that makes it all possible. These creatures do all this work for us. Can you imagine if we didn’t have bees how much it would cost us to pollinate flowers? The least we can do is provide a sympathetic habitat so they can flourish.
‘Paul and I love sitting in a favourite spot in the garden and observing all the activity around us. Sometimes I’ll get a text from him if I’m indoors saying, “Quick, come here. You’ll never guess what I’m looking at.” We’re sharing the planet with all these creatures and we all need to understand that a little better.’
‘Word soon got round that we’re a little oasis’