Knepp: A Vision of What is Possible

I had so many amazing experiences during my time at Knepp. I got the chance to witness the release of juvenile storks into the wild, see a turtle dove, go on a bat safari and feel (and hear) bats flying overhead, have little Tamworth piglets running around me. There were many smaller magical moments too, such as seeing the frondy lichen that indicates the good air quality on the Knepp estate, and seeing great swathes of silverweed carpeting the ground.

The most striking thing for me about the Knepp Estate is the hands-off approach that has been used for its conservation – as explained by Charlie Burrell when he came to the OpWall tent to talk about the process of rewinding the estate. The incredible diversity of life is not due to reintroductions or careful cultivation, it was simply what was dormant there through the many years of farming prior. To some extent, it feels like a huge outdoor laboratory, providing a rare opportunity to collect data about a site that has been “left to its own devices” at different times of year, and has had various levels of exposure to the “big 5” grazers at Knepp.

Encountering the Knepp Big 5 required a mindset shift, as they are there as a cog in the ecological system, not as producers of an agricultural product. With the Longhorn Cattle and Tamworth Pigs this required the biggest mindset shift of all for me, as I had only ever seen pigs and cattle in farms, part of a meat or milk production process. To see these animals just existing, like I am used to with deer or rabbits, was quite strange at first, but really opened my eyes to the ways that human culture has divided animals along lines that exist only to us.

Being with OpWall at Knepp also led me to realise that assumptions that I had held all my life about the root of health and mental heath struggles were based on a model of individual pathology rather than seeing them as a symptom of the culture our society breeds. My time at Knepp was transformative not just because I learnt more about animals, plants, insects, and ecology in that week than I had my whole life, but also because I gained a window into what a different, better, kind of human society could look like.

Over the week the group of us, around 30 in all, became incredibly close-knit. We spent all day out on surveys together, we ate together, we spent evenings getting excited over bird log (a daily event where we would shout out the birds we had heard or seen that day) and talking. For a week, we weren’t interacting with the world through a screen, but instead we were utterly immersed in the plants, the mammals, the birds. They days had a rhythm, dawn and dusk, data in between. There was a balance between life. We were still connected with the modern world: we still had a phone signal (the “ping” of a certain language learning app was heard frequently in the break after lunch!), and there was the sound of planes overhead, but in other ways we felt blissfully cocooned in nature. There was no sound of traffic, and scrub stretched as far as the eyes could see. I would wake each morning to the sound of the cockerel and turtle dove (which was illusive to the eye until the very last morning) and watch the roe deer and rabbits from the viewing platform at dusk. What I realised when I left Knepp, is that when such natural harmony as is in the rewilded landscape is the daily norm, the emotional defences of anxiety, depression, and anger are no longer needed as coping mechanisms against the modern assault of the senses. It became clear to me how city pavements and buildings are barricades that human society has used as a dividing line between humans and everything else on earth. That the current layout of urban areas “others” humans from nature and forcibly excludes us from wildness.

There was no single species that stood out to me at Knepp: the beauty of the land was the diversity of habitat, of plants, and birds and insects. I have lived in the UK all my life, and I expected to be familiar with the species at Knepp, but instead it felt like stepping into a whole new world, with a far greater range of native UK species than I even knew existed. Everywhere I would look, I would see something new and amazing to learn about. And, surrounded as I was by so many of the incredibly knowledgeable OpWall team, there was always someone to ask about how to ID something new. I have come away from Knepp realising that while a traditional cultivated garden is more colourful than wildland, it is often much more devoid of life and vitality, and that often, allowing natural processes in a landscape to take their course (while protecting from pollution and destruction by humans) is the fastest path to nature restoration. And that sometimes, it’s that patch of long grass by the shower block that the insects make the loudest place on campsite!

All photos by Mystaya Bremaud