Documentary
At Knepp Castle in Sussex, conservation pioneers Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell abandoned industrial farming practices and allowed nature to ‘rewild’ their 3,500-acre estate with remarkable results. Based on Tree’s bestselling book of the same name, Emmy-award winning nature documentarian David Allen’s Wilding is a charming, hopeful story of ecological regeneration.
When they inherited the estate in the 1980s, Tree and Burrell attempted to modernise the farm, but it proved unsustainable. In a leap of faith, they decided to let nature take back the land, surrendering contemporary preconceptions about landscape, agriculture and the husbandry traditional for historic estates. The scheme (all the more radical for being a mere 44 miles from London) was the first of its kind in Britain and one of the most significant rewilding experiments in all of Europe.
A beacon of hope for British wildlife, Knepp is now home to thriving flora and fauna of all kinds, while Tree and Burrell have evolved from amateur wildlife lovers to dedicated conservationists – both knowledgeable about the catastrophic loss of biodiversity in Britain, and quietly hopeful that work like theirs can reverse the decline.
