‘The healing power of nature saved my life’
Having survived Covid, Robin Hanbury-tenison is now busy ‘rewilding’ his estate. Sally Jones reports
‘Beavers helped to save my life,” smiles the great Cornish explorer Robin Hanbury-tenison, who, at 84, has defied medical opinion to beat Covid-19, after a five-week stint on a ventilator. “I dreamed about two things when I was fighting in intensive care, in an induced coma,” he explains. “Meeting my impending grandchild – and seeing the release of beavers at Cabilla. Through some miracle, I’ve lived to do both.”
On Friday, members of the family – including his four-week-old granddaughter Loveday – joined crowds of country-lovers and well-wishers at Cabilla, the family’s hill farm on Bodmin Moor, to watch the conservationist fulfil the second half of his wish.
In a sunlit clearing, Robin opened a cage housing a large beaver, which loped out casually and circulated among the enthralled watchers. It nuzzled their feet in friendly fashion before pottering off to explore its new surroundings: a two-acre enclosure along a wooded stream.
Watching Hanbury-tenison’s utter absorption in his latest initiative, it is hard to believe that, at the start of the coronavirus crisis, he was admitted to Derriford Hospital in Plymouth, blue-lighted by medics in hazmat suits in a 50-minute, high-speed dash. He was the first person in the South-west to be named as a Covid victim, and became the hospital’s oldest and sickest patient. The outlook was, he admits, pretty bleak.
But then, less than three months ago, Hanbury-tenison was wheeled, exhausted but relieved, off the ward. As he was discharged, he was clapped and cheered by a long honour guard of openly emotional nurses and doctors. None had expected him to survive, and three times the family was told to expect the worst. “I was in a pretty bad way, delirious and sedated for weeks,” he says, before adding with typical self-deprecation: “It was a nasty business.”
Still frail from his ordeal, he is gaining strength by the day, thanks to a gruelling rehab regime, daily walks and an iron determination to remain at the heart of a groundbreaking project designed to heal and restore the environment and those afflicted by the traumas of modern life.
“It sounds silly,” he says, “but I am convinced that being wheeled off the ward into the hospital garden is what saved my life. It was the most extraordinary turning point. I felt the sun on my face and the flowers… and suddenly I came out of it.”
The release of the female beaver into the enticing groves of willow, oak, hazel and rowan along the River Bedalder marks the first stage of the family’s long-held dream to “rewild” their Cornish estate. The rodent – christened Sigourney (Beaver), following a pun-strewn naming competition that threw up suggestions including “Justin”, “Longoria” and “Mendes” – has a vital role to play. Her intended mate, Jean-claude (van Damme), will join her in a month’s time, to breed and build dams that will transform this unspoilt valley and boost its biodiversity.
Hanbury-tenison and his younger son, Merlin, 35, a former Army officer, both passionate naturalists and self-confessed “beaver believers”, describe how the rodents, a “keystone species”, will create deep pools and fell trees, filtering and purifying the water and allowing sunlight in. This in turn will create many more niches where different species, from fungus and lichen to mayfly, bullhead trout and badger, can thrive in a complex ecosystem, producing a more sustainable, healthier environment.
With a quarter of Britain’s mammals under threat, the family also aims to restore the water vole population, depleted by mink and, more controversially, to reintroduce endangered red squirrels in the long term, using pine martens to wipe out the greys.
A lifelong environmentalist, Hanbury-tenison made his name in the late Seventies, leading the Royal Geographical Society’s largest expedition ever to the tropical Mulu rainforests of Sarawak in Borneo. The research undertaken here by more than 100 scientists helped to reveal the significance of rainforests as the “lungs of the world”.
Over the years, Hanbury-tenison has planted thousands of oaks at Cabilla, and moved from intensive to extensive farming: he and Merlin are beginning to replace the sheep and cattle grazing the uplands with ancient hardy breeds like Tamworth pigs, Highland cattle and, ultimately, bison.
Now, the wild valley’s remoteness is key to the next stage in its evolution. Both father and son are convinced that immersion in nature provides a vital antidote both to physical ailments and to the current epidemic of mental illness and anxiety, triggered by the stresses of urban living.
At the height of Hanbury-tenison’s seven-week coronavirus battle, the breakthrough came when he was wheeled out into Derriford’s unique ICU “Secret Garden” for half an hour each day. “I had all these tubes in me and four people pushing this big bed,” he explains. “Then I felt the sun on my face and the flowers… and I suddenly looked up and said: ‘We’ve cracked it – I’m going to live!’”
Merlin faced his own health struggles after three traumatic tours of Afghanistan as a reconnaissance commander. “Like many, I saw my fair share of action and in 2007 I was blown up in a roadside bomb blast,” he explained. “At first, it seemed to have no impact. Then, in 2017, I started suffering badly from PTSD and had a mini-breakdown: panic attacks, anxiety, bouts of depression. I had therapy, but I found that spending time in the valley, quietly experiencing nature in these woods was just as important. It helped calm me and restore my mental balance.
“It also gave us the idea of using our glorious surroundings to offer ‘forest-bathing’ retreats to veterans with PTSD, stressed urbanites, families or anyone who needs to escape from the hurly-burly of modern life. We’re converting nearby barns into a glamping hub, and with luck we should be up and running early next spring.”
His father pipes up: “Everyone is suffering because of the intensity and pollution of city life. The artificial environment imposes huge stresses on people’s psyches and it’s crucial that everyone should have access to wild, natural spaces where they can escape and restore their equilibrium.
“Nature is bloody marvellous,” he continues, “the way it bounces back, given half a chance. It’s been extraordinary to see how quickly it’s started to recover after everything stopped because of coronavirus. Getting the chance to reveal the wonderful things in this wood… to stressed people and encouraging them to look deeper into nature is what will help to heal them.
“The time is right for this,” Hanbury-tenison insists. “The world is ready.”
And he, of all people, should know.
‘Everyone should have access to the wild, where they can escape and be restored’