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When Charlie Burrell inherited the Sussex Knepp
Castle estate from his grandfather in 1984 he spent the
first fifteen years doing his utmost to continue farming
the 3,500 acres as his ancestors had done for 200 years.
But with its heavy clay and small fields Knepp just
wasn’t a practical proposition for the intensive
cultivation that is required to turn a profit in farming
today. The magnificent stately home parkland that had
been laid out by Humphrey Repton in the early 1800s
was long gone. In the battle to turn a profit, fields of
wheat and ryegrass had reached the castle doors. Then
in 2001 Charlie did something remarkable. He took 500
acres out of production and restored the parkland, not in
the formal 19th century manner but with native grasses
and wildflowers. Soon free roaming cattle and deer were
grazing around the castle kicking up a flurry of common
blue butterflies never before recorded on the estate.
Charlie Burrell was thrilled:
The sense of relief in just letting go was extraordinary....
It seemed an obvious step to expand the idea and rewild
the whole estate, if we could.
The following year Charlie visited Oostvaardersplassen
reserve in the Netherlands where 14,000-acres of
uninhabited fen, scrub, woodland and wild grassland had
been reclaimed from the sea and set aside for wildlife
alongside ancient free-roaming Heck cattle and Konik
horses and wild birds. When he came home he set about
adapting the Dutch model for Knepp. Down came the
internal fences and gates. Out went the dairy cows and
in came Old English Longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies,
red and fallow deer and Tamworth pigs and all of them
allowed to roam at will. These species, the Big Five,
are proxies for the auroch, elk and boar that roamed the
prehistoric landscape. With sowing and harvesting a thing
of the past these large herbivores now began to drive the
habitat changes. Within three years the manicured fields
had been replaced by a wild landscape.
The herds at Knepp are raised on a naturalistic system -
which means they are allowed to range freely in blocks
of over a thousand acres of varied wildland habitat
incorporating open pastures, dense scrub, water
meadows, woods, streams and ponds. The animals live
outdoors all year round fending for themselves. There is
no supplementary feeding and no assisted breeding.
They forage as they would in the wild, feeding on over
250 organic herbs and grasses, browsing on shrubs and
leaves when they feel like it. They are managed with
minimal human intervention, spending their entire lives
outside, in family groups, weaning their calves naturally.
The animals are carefully harvested to manage the
landscape - too many animals and it would become a
plain, too few and the woodland would take over. The
masterchef Heston Blumenthal reckons longhorn is the
best tasting beef in the world. Knepp Castle longhorn
beef is the real deal - slow-grown, stress-free,
wild-ranging, grass fed naturally-reared longhorn beef.
The once-silent fields of Knepp Castle now thrum with
insects and bird song. Nightingales, which hadn’t been
heard here for 50 years returned in 2010 and are thriving.
Water voles are doing well, as well as several nationally
rare lepidoptera, beetles, bees and Barbastelle and
Bechstein’s bats. There are plans to allow a 1.5-mile
stretch of the River Adur, canalised in the 18th century,
to meander naturally across the land, allowing seasonal
flooding to attract even more wildlife. It’s the biggest
proposed stretch of river to be naturalised in Britain.
The Wild Side of Sussex
