Wilding at Knepp: the mother ship
For the past twenty years, Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree have been letting their Sussex farmland go wild. Forced to shift their thinking and farming practices because of the economic collapse and ecological degradation of their estate, they re-conceived Knepp as a wildlife project.
Part of the brilliance of what they have done is to document the science of wilding, of the increase in rare insects and birds that occurred when the soil, hedges and water at Knepp started to recover. It is a tale of exponential and unexpected revivals, a hopeful eco story at a time when radical action is the only hope we have.
Having read Isabella Tree’s Wilding in lockdown, I had a craving to be at Knepp. I booked one of their safari walks, exploring the estate with a group of equally excited and alert fellow walkers.
Isabella Tree writes about how our notion of what is natural has shifted, so that now a rolling hill, divided by fields and topped by an inert clump of trees, has come to represent the British countryside.
The land at Knepp moves, grubbed up and trampled by free-ranging pigs, seeds splatting into the upturned soil in cowpats, hedges thickening into gorgeous groves. In its essence Knepp answers the stirring in us towards nature, echoed in the uncoiling of a grass snake we spotted – a now rare sight but one that twisted through the childhoods of the older members of our walking group.
Photographs of the animals at Knepp do no justice to the feeling of encountering long-horned cattle idling free across the landscape, or the thrill of seeing the pigs greedily rootling and then trotting away as we approached. Crowds of white storks, which hatched young at Knepp in 2020 for the first time in Britain in 600 years, speak of a time of larger and more stately birds than the little garden creatures we have become used to.
On a macro level, the carpet of silverweed forming a soft tapestry across the landscape was a pleasure for all us walkers. I could write pages about Knepp, But Isabella Tree has already done that in her wonderful book. So I say – read it, and then visit the estate.
I cycled there from Horsham station in around an hour, and stayed at the estate’s campsite. There are enticing glamping options on site but they get booked up very early. Save your money, take a tent and splash out on one of the safari walks. They are terrific – informal but informed – and without that experience you are confined to public paths and can’t see the truly wild parts of the project. There’s an onsite café and an excellent farm shop so you won’t go hungry. But you will go wild.
