WILDING

Watch The Trailer

Storyline (warning: spoilers)

LFS is showing Wilding as an event partner of the agriCULTURED festival. The film will begin with an introduction by LFS member Caro Brown who is Chair of the Festival.

Isabella Tree and her husband, Charlie Burrell, were deep in debt when they stopped farming 25 years ago. Their soil had been degraded by pesticides, fertiliser and chemicals used to coax their crops. Seeing no future for the farm, they sold their dairy herds and machinery, paid their debts, and let nature take its course. It was not an easy decision. Charles is the 10th Baronet of Knepp. Selling the estate, which had been in his family since 1787, was unthinkable.

Both he and Isabella were environmentalists, painfully aware of the many species of birds and mammals heading for extinction in Britain, and they wanted to see if anything would change if the land were allowed to return to its natural state. The couple’s most radical decision is prompted by a meeting with Dutch ecologist Frans Vera, who bucks conventional wisdom with his belief that the landscape can be enhanced by permitting large animals to roam free. They bring in old English longhorn cattle, together with Exmoor ponies and Tamworth pigs. All are left to forage for themselves and dig up the ground as they please.

There are early disasters. At a gathering on the estate, one of the ponies raids the catering tent and disrupts a polo game. Later, at a meeting with local farmers, rewilding is criticised as a potential threat to farmland. Nor do the farmers like the messy appearance of a landscape, and they fear the dangers posed by the spread of invasive plants. 

As time goes on, good news emerges. Earthworms enrich the soil dug up by the animals. The nightingale returns, along with the harvest mouse and the turtle dove, one of the most endangered birds in the country. The pigs, which eat acorns, spread the seed and young oak trees sprout. And white storks, last seen breeding in Britain 600 years ago, proliferate after a pair is brought to Knepp. 

The animals are forming paths through a topography which is wild, majestic and eerily beautiful.