Our rewilding journey
Did you ever just buy a book and it changed everything? That’s what happened to us. The book was Wilding by Isabella Tree and it literally changed everything we’ve done with this place ever since.
That was 6 years ago now. When we first arrived back at the farm it’s fair to say we didn’t know very much about the land, or how we would look after it. I couldn’t have told you a blackthorn from a hawthorn, I could have barely named you a British wildflower, and I’m not sure I’d ever really seen a barn owl in the wild.
These days I know the days and the seasons by the coming of the trees and the plants. I wait with patience for the coming of the wild garlic and the primroses in the spring, and I am thrilled by every new plant or flower that returns to the fields, learning names and leaf shapes, marvelling at every detail. Our barn owls scoot overhead as they search for prey. The rewilding of the fields has created such a thatch of grasses that they are a perfect habitat for voles and mice, and we think that’s why the barn owls have moved in permanently – for the last two years they’ve raised a healthy brood of four chicks on site.
It felt wild when we got here, but in reality the fields were bowling green short – mowed down by a flock of someone else’s sheep that Ed’s Dad had been grazing on the fields.
The huge, wild, ancient hedges had not been touched, for which we were very grateful, but the bottom third had been substantially chewed by cattle. Ed remembers as a child helping his Dad pull out the gorse hedges that once crossed the fields and burning them. Hedges we have now carefully replanted.
More recently Ed’s Dad had been renting the fields out to a local farmer, and while they weren’t heavily grazed, they had had the usual treatment of nitrogen fertilisers and spraying for docks. Cows and then sheep had been grazed on them intermittently.
After reading Wilding we made the decision that we would let nature take back control – no more spraying or fertilising, we would just let her take back her land. We didn’t plough or disrupt the land – we just let it be (whether we should have grazers is a long running conversation in our house and how you mix longhorns with glamping guests is yet to be resolved!).
We have interfered in some places and I think the tension between doing and not doing when rewilding is a complex one. But we’ve planted trees. Lots of trees! Once this land would have been ancient woodland – a fragment still exists at the bottom of our steep sided fields where the beck runs through. It’s full of ancient woodland indicator species: giant oaks tower over bluebells and ferns, wild garlic, dog mercury, primrose and wood anemone. Alder and hazel grow on the banks of the stream.
We’ve learned an awful lot; the first year I planted the wrong trees in the wrong places – and then the deer ate loads of them anyway. Now I know to plant alder and hazel in the damp of the edge of the woods and they are thriving! In places nature has planted far more trees than we could have done – huge swathes of spiky blackthorn have appeared, and tiny hazel encroach the edge of the woods.
We’ve learnt to keep our nerve, the first year there were a million docks – but we’ve even learnt to love them; did you know their deep roots break up the soil for other plants to take root? The docks died back and then we got lots of thistles (and goldfinches!), but they too have died back to a less crazy level and last year was the year of the buttercup, but much more variety has started to arrive. Each new arrival is treated with joy, from the cuckooflower with its dainty pink flowers, to the giant teasels which have become properly established this year.
The places where it’s worked best are a combination of nature and us where we’ve got it right – I’m sure nature would do a great job without us entirely but we are impatient! In one wet corner we planted alder at the edge of the woodland 3 or 4 years ago and they are now 7 feet tall and now the woodland and the scrub have come out to meet the trees, and you can just see that it will be proper woodland again before you know it!
One day I hope the woodland will again stretch up our steep hillsides, and many species will thrive in this wild place. We will never see it fully grown, and I’ve learnt that the human lifespan is only a blink in the scheme of a woodland, but that doesn’t make it any less special.
