RETURN TO EDEN
Can the controversial practice known as rewilding recreate paradise on Earth?
From the rivers of East Devon to the orchid-rich meadows of Highgrove and the rolling Scottish Highlands, forward-thinking farmers and landowners are experimenting with ambitious – if sometimes controversial – projects that trust in nature to lead the way, and reveal the savage beauty of the untamed countryside. Julia Rochester hears the call of the wild
Perched at the top of a forked tree, a pair of storks are silhouetted against the sunset. Earlier, they had wheeled overhead, their enormous, blacktipped wings spread wide, their beaks a bright scarlet. Not since the 15th century has there been a record of wild storks breeding in Britain; and this frosty Sussex savannah does indeed feel out of time, with its solitary oaks rising out of acres of unkempt scrub, and a family of tawny-hided pigs foraging beside a stream as dusk draws in.
We are used to experiencing our countryside in planes of colour, edged by neat lines of trees and fences, like a carefully crafted patchwork quilt. But its tidiness masks an uncomfortable truth: decades of intensive farming have taken their toll. According to a 2016 report, the UK is now one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. And while the Forestry Commission’s announcement in January that tree-planting initiatives have helped restore Britain’s woodland cover to mediaeval levels is heartening, we still lag some way behind Europe. Not before time, a national conversation has begun about what we can do
to bring greater biodiversity and wildness into Britain’s rural regions.
The unfamiliar and gloriously unruly landscape at Knepp Castle Estate, where I am walking, may offer some ideas. Almost 20 years ago, Charlie Burrell and his wife Isabella Tree gave up their unsustainable battle with global markets, fluctuations in milk-quota values and the infamous Sussex clay to set about ‘rewilding’ their 3,500 acres. The Burrells took down miles of fence and introduced the free-roaming animals that I meet on my walk through what is now known as Knepp Wildland: fallow deer with extravagant antlers, those pigs, a herd of pretty longhorn cattle.
These are the stars of Knepp’s ‘grazing ecology’ – a phrase that describes the hands-off process by which animals and vegetation are able to interact to create a rich and ever-evolving ecosystem. The rootling of swine, and the different grazing styles of cattle, deer and ponies, put a check on the scrub, opening up new habitats to other species, while their dung and urine, free from antibiotics and worming treatments, nourish the soil. ‘Rewilding,’ as Tree defines it, ‘is restoration by letting go, allowing nature to take the driving seat.’
At Knepp, the sole human intervention has been to cull the grazing animals, and in an astonishingly short time, wilderness has returned. In spring and summer, the air thrums with the sound of birds, insects and rutting stags; tawny and barn owls have made their homes there; rare purple emperor butterflies proliferate in its willow scrub; and endangered birds, such as turtle doves and nightingales, return year on year to breed.
Not only is the experiment an extraordinary success in terms of natural recovery, it is also a thriving business. Knepp’s wildlife safaris sell out to the nature-starved, who may never have heard a nightingale sing, and the Burrells cannot keep up with demand for their high-quality meat. Meanwhile, other landowners, who once thought the Burrells mad, if not irresponsible, flock to Knepp to learn from their experience, and Wilding, Tree’s wonderful book on the subject, has sold 170,000 copies. ‘Six years ago, if I’d brought it out, I don’t think anyone would have heard of rewilding, or cared about it,’ she says.
Now, rewilding has even become a storyline in Radio 4’s farming soap opera The Archers. ‘We’re very alive to the fact that it is controversial and, if adopted on a large scale, could alter the landscape fundamentally,’ says Sarah Swadling, the programme’s agriculture advisor, who visited Knepp
as part of her research. ‘Starting a rewilding project in Ambridge right now gives us a canvas to reflect on the changes it might bring to the English countryside over the coming decades. But it’s unlikely that David Archer is going to have to protect his sheep flock from lynx or wolves.’
This is because Ambridge, like Knepp, is a lowland area. It is in the uplands, and the Highlands of Scotland, where rewilders dare to dream of the restoration of a fully functional ecosystem on a massive scale, free of human intervention, such as would have existed on our island hundreds of years ago: true wilderness. And this is where the debate turns to predators.
George Monbiot’s book Feral, which sparked the Rewilding Britain movement, but also enraged hill farmers by coining the provocative expression ‘sheep-wrecked’ to describe the landscape, is an appeal for the restoration of wild spaces to the UK’S uplands with the reintroduction of predatory breeds. Wolves are the holy grail of rewilding in the UK. Considered a ‘keystone species’ in ecological terms, they can be used to control the number and behaviour of grazing animals, in turn creating habitats for others, with effects right down into the soil and the river systems. Naturally, the idea of wolves triggers safety concerns, though proponents of bringing them back assert that they are now restored to countries such as Germany in significant numbers, with little effect on humans.
Paul Lister, the owner of Alladale Wilderness Reserve in Sutherland and founder of the European Nature Trust, is one such enthusiast. ‘I’m driven by connecting people to nature,’ he explains. ‘Scotland is predominantly occupied with traditional landowning… management is mostly to do with extractive things such as forestry, hydro, wind turbines, hunting, shooting, fishing. There are some good examples of people who do all that very well, but it doesn’t make for a pretty landscape, especially when you throw sheep on there as well. So, my vision, and that of a dozen other landowners, is to bring life back into the place and to create income from tourists who have never been to Scotland before. And we’ve been quite successful at it.’
Since acquiring the land in 2003, Lister has carried out an extensive conservation programme encompassing tree planting, peatland restoration, outdoor education for local children, wildcat conservation and the reintroduction of red squirrels. ‘It’s a tiny example of what someone who’s fortunate enough to have some cash can do,’ he says. Within five years, he expects to be ready for wolves. ‘I’m not releasing them into the freedom of the countryside, they’re going into a massive enclosure. A South African-style game reserve in the Scottish Highlands.’ His plan, he believes, will have a positive impact on the ‘five Es’ – ethics, the environment, the economy, education and employment. ‘Let’s have something up in the Highlands that creates a draw, and gets more people into nature and employed in rural communities that aren’t exactly thriving.’
One of the ‘dozen other landowners’ to whom Lister refers is the UK’S largest – namely the Danish billionaire Anders Povlsen, who is responsible for the estates that form Wildland Scotland. But Thomas Macdonnell, Wildland’s director of conservation, doesn’t believe that Scotland is ready for wolves, and sees the term ‘rewilding’ as being hijacked by the debate about predators. ‘We need to start at the foundations,’ he says. ‘We need to get the habitat right first.’
Macdonnell is in no hurry. He thinks in 50-year units, scrupulously documenting every stage of an ambitious rehabilitation initiative in Glenfeshie, in the Cairngorms. We spend a day driving around the estate, criss-crossing the Spey, stopping for tea by the fire at one of Wildland’s meticulously renovated lodges; we also admire the newly restored bothy, which is always open and free to walkers, and where, of an evening, Macdonnell wanders over to share a whisky.
As we drive, he explains why the darkly brooding, stark beauty of these snow-capped mountains, home to golden eagles, wildcats and the endangered capercaillie, is not the untamed wilderness it appears. ‘You hear people talk about Scotland’s beautiful heather-coloured hills. They’re beautiful, but it’s a monoculture of overgrazing.’ The deer, which are allowed to breed in huge numbers for stalkers to shoot, have destroyed what would naturally be slopes of forest and woodland.
In order to begin the process of natural forest regeneration, Wildland took the unpopular decision to cull thousands of deer, and Macdonnell received death threats. ‘I slept with a loaded shotgun under my bed for three months,’ he admits. But the results were worth it. ‘We have got down to low deer numbers, we don’t have any fences, the place is regenerating. It has worked.’
In one of those caprices of the Scottish weather, the sun passes over the glen, and hundreds of young trees, which would formerly have been grazed to the ground, light up like bright-green flames against the brown flank of the mountain. ‘It’s cathedral thinking,’ says Macdonnell – a leap of faith that in two centuries this will be a dynamic system of forest, woodland, wetland and peat, sequestering carbon and supporting a wealth of wildlife.
He points to a tree at the edge of the road: ‘I remember sitting underneath this. It was at that stage where we’d had the deer reduced. We’d shot thousands and I was thinking, “Oh God! Have I messed this up? Is everybody right, that nothing’s going to happen?” Then all of a sudden it was this pulse of regeneration. Thousands of seedlings starting to appear out of the heather. I still find it a bit spiritual…’
At the opposite end of the country, on the fringes of Dartmoor near where I grew up, I experience my own spiritual moment. I am standing in a field gazing at a landscape that has been entirely engineered by beavers. Uprights, diagonals, arcs, explosions of willow shoots lace the sky above a higgledy-piggledy descent of ponds. The air is full of the sound of water trickling, birdsong and movement. The beavers, being nocturnal, are asleep in their lodges. But the world they have created is fully awake, with its own throb of existence. I have a sense of recognition, a feeling that my ancestors would have known this scene.
‘We were trying to use beavers to clear scrub from grassland,’ says Mark Elliott, an ecologist with the Devon Wildlife Trust (DWT), pointing out an area of culm grass, now home to orchids and marsh fritillary butterflies. ‘It soon became apparent that they were doing more; they just transformed the stream.’
The dams that beavers create push water sideways, generating wetland habitats for other species and slowing down the flow. Now, Elliott sees potential for beavers to become part of flood-management solutions.
In 2015, two beaver families appeared on the River Otter in East Devon, 300 years after they were last seen (rumour has it that they were released by vigilante ‘beaver bombers’). Under licence, DWT has been monitoring their activity, and there is evidence that their presence is reducing the risks to floodprone communities. ‘We’re showing beavers can return to a cultural landscape that’s being intensively farmed, and without any major conflicts,’ says Elliott.
Even so, problems inevitably arise. At Otterton Mill, another DWT ecologist, Jake Chant, has just spent the morning up to his waist in a stream, breaking up a beaver dam that had backed up water into a nearby paddock, potentially wrecking the owner’s new fence. Where the beavers are troublesome, the consequences can be severe to an individual landowner, so DWT is on hand to intervene where necessary. On the whole, however, the experiment is a success, with 13 beaver families now inhabiting the river. The locals have taken them into their hearts, strolling down to the river bank on summer evenings, drinks in hand, to watch the adult beavers with their kits.
The conversation about how we ‘put the environment first’, as the government now promises to do in its 25 Year Environment Plan, has only just begun, and it raises difficult questions. How can we square food production with increasing biodiversity? What status should we accord glorious cultural landscapes such as the Lake District, which have been created by generations of sheep farming? But the message of hope in all this is that nature, given the chance, will recover swiftly: soil can be enriched, peatlands can be revived, trees will grow, wildlife will return.
Perhaps the biggest shift in public perception of our landscape is seen in how we are re-embracing wildflowers. The statistics are sobering. Ninety-seven per cent of Britain’s wildlife meadows have been ploughed up since the 1930s – a total of 7.5 million acres. Prince Charles has made this a personal cause, planting his own wildflower meadow at Highgrove in 1982. It is now ‘awash with orchids’, according to Dr Trevor Dines, a botanical specialist with the charity Plantlife, of which the Prince is patron. In 2013, to mark the anniversary of the Queen’s coronation, Prince Charles launched the Coronation Meadows initiative. Across the UK, a donor meadow in each county has been selected to be the seed source for new ones. ‘It was his idea as a birthday present to the Queen,’ explains Dines. ‘He is passionate about them, and not just for their beauty. He loves that link with agriculture.’
Dines planted his own coronation meadow in Wales, which is grazed by highland cattle. He quotes an old adage: ‘Livestock make meadows and meadows make livestock.’ Species of butterflies and wild bees have doubled in only five years, and curlew, lapwings and goldfinches feed there. Biodiversity reaps other rewards, according to Dines, with the plants providing minerals that would have to be supplemented in conventional grazing. ‘We’re just starting to recognise the medicinal value for livestock of a species-rich diet,’ he says. More importantly, initially sceptical farmers are coming on board. ‘My greatest moment came last year when an old farmer visited just as we were completing the hay harvest. He said, “I don’t need to look at it. I can smell it from here. That’s the best hay I’ve seen in 50 years.”’
‘For the first time in a long while, I feel very optimistic,’ says Isabella Tree. ‘We get emails from people. We show big landowners around the whole time, we’re now increasingly getting farmers, but it goes right down to individuals with a back garden. There’s the sense that there are so many people out there wanting to do their bit.’
A friend of mine is delving into the archives of her Exmoor farm in order to reinstate its historical hedgerows; another wants to know what can be done with a London roof terrace. And Tree has recently been asked how to rewild a window box.
Is it too much to wish that all these individual efforts will eventually join up? Perhaps, one day, our descendants will walk through fields of wildflowers along meandering rivers, up into forest wildernesses, where, through the trees, they may hope to catch a fleeting glimpse of a wolf…
THE AIR THRUMS WITH THE SOUND OF BIRDS, RARE BUTTERFLIES PROLIFERATE AND TURTLE DOVES RETURN TO BREED