Wilding review – farmland returns to nature in green and

Mapping the regeneration of over-farmed and polluted land given over to the wild in 2000, this is a welcome story about nature’s ability to just get on with it

You’ll never look at a green and pleasant pasture in the same way again after watching this documentary about the rewilding project at the Knepp estate in West Sussex. The land belongs to Sir Charles Burrell, 10th baronet (he goes by plain old Charlie), who was in his 20s when he inherited the five-and-a-half square mile estate. The plan was to follow in the family tradition of farming, but the heavy clay soil at Knepp didn’t suit modern intensive methods so, in 2000, £1.5m in debt, Burrell and his conservationist wife, Isabella Tree, sold the cows and let everything go to seed.

Looking at Knepp’s unruly landscape today, all thorny scrubland, brambles and little mounds dug by who knows which critter, what’s startling is the realisation that countryside as most of us understand it isn’t actually countryside as nature intended. Knepp is not postcard pretty but its wild beauty is habitat heaven. Species virtually extinct elsewhere have sniffed out Knepp and are thriving: from purple emperor butterflies to turtle doves and nightingales. Amazingly, the first wild storks born in the UK in 600 years hatched at Knepp.