9.4 Rewilding

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

It all started when I was eleven years old. I was lying on the grass at the edge of the village cricket ground, with views of the wooded North Downs all around. A cricket match was in progress but I was more interested in my book, The Hobbit. All at once I realised that I loved this landscape and that one day it could be lost. Whether that was the result of something in the book, or whether it was something in me, I don’t know.
    Later in my teens I explored the Downs and their flora, first with the help of the botanist mother of a friend and later on my own. The wildflowers stunned me with their variety and beauty. The landscape was alive and breathing. It spoke to me. I was connected to it.
    In my late teens and early twenties when I went to London to work I was equally stunned by the horror of the place – the concrete and tarmac, the dirt, the greyness, the noise, the smell, the frightening people, the money-grabbing. The pointlessness of it all.
    Once in Devon, even though at first I thought the landscape was dull after Kent – where were all the trees? – I grew to love it, especially the hedgerows that brimmed with flowers from March to October. With the realisation that this too could all be lost, a pain grew inside me. I read an article that described that sort of environmental anguish as deep grief. That was exactly what it was.
    Over the next few decades, I joined conservation organisations, wrote about the environment, campaigned with Friends of the Earth. But nothing seemed to change, either in me or in the world at large.
    I joined a protest against a motorway being pushed through sites of Special Scientific and archaeological interest, not to mention beauty, but it seemed pointless. Many locals wanted the road. I realised that anger and criticism never changed anything.
    Everything about the environmental movement I concluded was negative – don’t drive, don’t shop, don’t eat this or that – and prescriptive. There was only one way to think. It was yet another straightjacket.
    Then, as usual, I read a book.

It was the title that caught my attention, and the picture on the cover. Both reflected how I felt: trapped in an alien world. The book described a new, wholly positive, solution to the environmental crisis and the crisis in human being.
    The solution was ‘rewilding’, which meant letting damaged ecosystems heal themselves and bringing back missing species so that nature could look after itself.
    I could see so clearly that this was the only thing that would save the world – and me – and humankind. We needed to be wild and whole too.

Then I read another book.

This described the actual rewilding of Knepp, a tired farmed estate in West Sussex. It was written by the owner and read like a novel. I couldn’t put it down, and what was more the estate was only a couple of miles from where my brother Danny lived and was open to the public. I raced to see him and dragged him and his family out there.
    As we drove through the grounds to the carpark, I could see either side of us instead of the usual manicured grass an enticing jumble of scrub. I was back in my childhood. I remembered those sorts of places. I remembered crawling and hiding and making dens, imbibing the scent of bark, scraping my knees.
    We entered the estate on foot through an arch of intertwined deer antlers. It was like entering Jurassic Park. My heart started to thump.
    Once in, I gazed at a jungle of scrub and trees, stretching to the horizon. The shop and carpark had vanished. We were in a separate place, another dimension. 

    It was late September and the leaves were beginning to change colour. Late blackberries and bedraggled wildflowers lined the path. Then a flock of storks flew over. I started to cry again. I was in a dream, like I had been in Australia. I had zoomed back in time to the early days of humanity. I was in some lost paradise.

    My family thought I was mad, but then they always had. (Or perhaps I thought I was mad.) My sister-in-law gave me a hug and a smile.

We spent several hours wandering, interacting with cattle and pigs living wild (piglets squealed in the undergrowth next to the path) and birdspotting on the wetlands. 

These cattle and pigs are old breeds, close to the original wild species. Both ignored us.

At last we had to leave the rewilded area to cross to the final part of the estate. We walked up a perfectly respectable path lined with trees but for some reason we all sped up and began walking with purpose.
    ‘How peculiar,’ I said.
    ‘Yes,’ said Frog. ‘The “dawdle factor” has gone.’
    He’d put it perfectly. For a dyslexic, he certainly had a way with words.
    I was bereft. Dawdling had felt good.

In the next portion, the park in front of the house, we found wild ponies and a flock of red deer. The grass was short, presumably because of the two sorts of grazers, and even though I heard the mating call of a stag for the first time in my life, the magic had gone. We were too close to civilisation perhaps.

A stag in rut. We kept at a safe distance.

Both Danny and I were inspired however by the visit. He resolved to rewild his farm (which wasn’t his main source of income) and I resolved to rewild my quarter of an acre of garden. The day at Knepp had changed us both.

In our relationship Frog and I were stuck, but the outside world had found a way forward. Maybe we could too.

To be continued