{"id":682148,"date":"2026-07-09T11:03:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T11:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/682148\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T11:03:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T11:03:09","slug":"it-makes-your-heart-sing-can-a-pioneering-project-show-that-rewilding-really-works-rewilding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/682148\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It makes your heart sing\u2019: can a pioneering project show that rewilding really works? | Rewilding"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the silent countryside south of Grantham, three vast steel barns rattled in the breeze. Gathered in a loose circle beside them were 15 landowners, land agents and a couple of young investors; all expensively dressed men, many with a sceptical mien. It was June 2022, and Sir Charles Raymond Burrell, 10th Baronet, was explaining how the purchase of 1,525 bleak acres (617 hectares) of prairie fields of wheat and beans could revolutionise farming and nature conservation, not just in South Lincolnshire<\/a> but across Britain and beyond.<\/p>\n

Burrell, known by everyone as Charlie, led the group on a walk from the barns beside the unlovable modern farmhouse, a red-brick behemoth with small windows like piggy eyes. We began by crossing a field of broad beans. Less than a century ago, it had been a patchwork of 10 fields. As we walked over the hard, cracked ground, we encountered not a single insect. Later, by a verge, a couple of butterflies flew. As for humans, we didn\u2019t meet a single other person in our two-and-a-half-hour stroll across a range of footpaths and field edges. \u201cThis is a ruined landscape,\u201d said one of the guests, the architectural historian Matthew Rice. \u201cNot because of the soils. Because there are no people here. I\u2019m sorry there are not enough stoats but I\u2019d like there to be some children here, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is a farm? Most of us still picture a storybook image from childhood: cows, pigs, wheat, a pond, a farmer, a family. The farm that had, until recently, operated on this site was more typical of today\u2019s \u201chard-arsed\u201d farming, as Burrell put it. Boothby Lodge Farm had been a business owned by an absentee landlord. No one lived off the land, or on it. Tenants rented the farmhouse and worked elsewhere. More than 92% of the land was ploughed field. A contract farmer simply drove in with big machines several days each year to produce wheat and beans in relatively poor clay soils. Pheasants were released on the 3% of the farm that was woodland. For a few days each winter, men would pay to shoot them.<\/p>\n

Boothby Lodge Farm made \u00a3250,000 profit each year but half of this came through the \u201cbasic payment\u201d, a simple and generous subsidy for land owned that the government planned to halt by 2027. Beyond that date, thanks to reforms introduced by Michael Gove during his stint as environment secretary, farmers would only receive \u201cpublic money for public goods\u201d \u2013 that is, if their land provided clean water, or healthy soils, or wildlife-rich hedgerows, none of which Boothby appeared to be doing.<\/p>\n

Hard-arsed farming has been the main driver of Britain\u2019s contribution to the global extinction crisis. Over the past century, England and Wales have lost 98% of wildflower meadows<\/a>. We have also destroyed half of Britain\u2019s ancient woodland, half of lowland ponds, 90% of freshwater wetlands and 62% of all \u201cfarmland\u201d wild birds.<\/p>\n

As we walked, Burrell explained how we might reverse this, on this farm at least. In late 2021, the company he co-founded, Nattergal, had bought the farm for \u00a313.8m<\/a>. It intended to ditch 6,000 years of farming history on this land. No crops would be sown. No fertilisers or pesticides would be added to the fields. They planned to smash up the drains that had been painstakingly installed by generations of farmers to remove rainwater from their fields. The soils would spring up with weeds. Boothby Lodge Farm was to become Boothby Wildland.<\/p>\n

Boothby Lodge Farm before the rewilding project began. Photograph: Gaia Visual for Nattergal<\/p>\n

The landowners listened intently to a prospectus that would horrify most farmers. They did so because Burrell, with his relaxed charm, sturdy good health and strong hands, looked and sounded like the pragmatic farmer he had once trained to be. This deceptively radical aristocrat also had a great success behind him. On his 3,500-acre estate of Knepp in West Sussex, he and his wife, Isabella Tree, had reversed farming history in 2000. Having been derided by neighbours for a decade and a half, the couple now presided over the poster child for British rewilding, a farm that had become a hotspot for rare nightingales, turtle doves, white storks and purple emperor butterflies; a hugely popular ecotourism destination that still produced free-range meat and vegetables and employed dozens more people than standard farms. Most pertinent to today\u2019s audience, by rewilding his estate, Burrell had turned a loss-making business into a highly profitable one.<\/p>\n

Emboldened by this transformation, Burrell hoped to expand the Knepp model. He intended to show that we could farm wildlife, and make a profit from doing so. Our environmental crises could not be tackled by governments or grassroots action alone. We must, he said, show financial markets that restoring nature is good for business. We must make nature profitable, because it is only by attracting vast investment from the private sector that we can reverse the catastrophic decline of the planet\u2019s other species.<\/p>\n

Burrell\u2019s project in Lincolnshire was his pioneering attempt, and one of the largest and most dramatic examples of reversing conventional land management in the country. Abandoning farming in a county known as the bread basket of Britain was almost provocative. It was hard to imagine restoring nature in a landscape so devoid of life. But that is what Burrell set about doing. And so, for the past four years, I have followed what has unfolded in and around Boothby Wildland, to see whether it really could deliver on Burrell\u2019s ambition and his unusual blend of idealism and business-minded realism. And over that time, some answers have hoved into view.<\/p>\n

2022<\/p>\n

The desolate feeling of Boothby never quite left me that first day. I had arrived late and missed the introductions so it took me several hours to work out who was who. A\u00a0sharp-eyed northerner called Jim who sounded like a\u00a0self-made businessman turned out to be William James Lowther, 9th Earl of Lonsdale, resident of Lowther Castle and the owner of 30,000 acres in Cumbria. A trendy young man represented several pop stars looking for an investment that came with the right optics.<\/p>\n

Burrell was an affable guide. Assured without being cocky, he allowed his guests to speak and listened respectfully. His vision for Boothby was to stop farming its fields over the next three years. After five to seven years, he would bring in free-ranging herbivores. It could be cows, ponies, Tamworth pigs or even bison. Herbivores were crucial to rewilding projects, he explained, because their dung restored soil life and their grazing stopped the land becoming a dark woodland, which is unsuitable for a wide range of plants and invertebrates.<\/p>\n

Burrell was on sure ecological ground but there were sharp questions about the sums. His company, Nattergal \u2013 Danish for nightingale \u2013 already had a slick website, which announced that its purpose was \u201cto create serious focused investment into the restoration of terrestrial and marine ecosystems across the planet\u201d. The company was backed by Peter Davies of Lansdowne Capital, an investment house in London; the multimillionaire Ben Goldsmith, who ran a green investment company; and Jeremy Leggett, a solar entrepreneur. The company promised to deliver at least a 4.5% return for investors. \u201cWe\u2019re hoping to expand the idea throughout Europe. We\u2019re thinking about a billion-dollar project,\u201d said Burrell, casually. His funders tended to be those putting a tiny portion of their fortunes into \u201csomething nice,\u201d said Burrell. \u201cThey feel safe because it\u2019s land and if it goes pear-shaped they\u2019ll sell the land and get their money back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead of flogging wheat for a modest profit, Boothby Wildland\u2019s business model revolved around selling Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) units. From 2024, the government would oblige housebuilders and infrastructure projects to create 10% more nature<\/a> than was on their site before the development. If developers were unable to add nature to their building sites, they could buy credits that would guarantee that nature was restored elsewhere. Boothby would also sell carbon credits, for the carbon sequestered by stopping ploughing and allowing scrub and trees to regenerate. Like all farmers, Burrell still hoped to harvest some government subsidies but this time the grants would be for environmentally friendly land management, including payments for ecosystem services such as reducing flood risk by better managing the small river that ran through the farm. In the long term, his pitch was that the returning nature would create a sustainable ecotourism business, just as it had at Knepp.<\/p>\n

Wheat fields at Boothby Lodge Farm before its rewilding. Photograph: Jonathan Perugia\/Gaia Visual for Nattergal<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat about land decreasing in value when it\u2019s rewilded?\u201d asked one landowner.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe old model of land value being linked to what you can grow on it is completely gone,\u201d answered Burrell.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy not set aside 50 acres for a housing estate?\u201d suggested another.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot interested,\u201d said Burrell, firmly.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you\u2019re not going to work the asset at all?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy would you do that?\u201d<\/p>\n

The value of land is not important when you aim to hold it in perpetuity, argued Burrell.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no \u2018in perpetuity\u2019,\u201d scoffed another landowner.<\/p>\n

Burrell had endured two decades of hostility from his landowner fraternity over Knepp. \u201cThe principle is, this is about the recovery of nature to this land,\u201d he said. \u201cThen everything else follows.\u201d<\/p>\n

One lesson he had learned, he said, was to involve local people. Boothby appeared to be empty land but it was surrounded by three pretty villages, Boothby Pagnell, Ingoldsby and Bitchfield, and Burrell and Nattergal\u2019s head of natural capital, Ivan de Klee, had wisely hosted village hall meetings before they revealed the purchase to the media. Compared with the bafflement that met his \u201crewilding\u201d project in 2000, by 2022 there was enthusiasm for the idea, galvanised in Britain by writers such as George Monbiot, and Isabella Tree\u2019s book and documentary, Wilding<\/a>, which told the story of the Knepp revolution.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone said: \u2018Don\u2019t say rewilding. People in Lincolnshire hate it.\u2019 I\u2019m calling it rewilding,\u201d said de Klee, a tall young man who shared Burrell\u2019s knack of remaining unflustered when challenged. De Klee had attended the first village hall gathering with Burrell. \u201cIn the opening half hour there were two very loud, very angry people, talking about the loss of food production,\u201d he said. \u201cThen someone from the farming community stood up and said: \u2018We might not all rewild but farming is going to change and we need innovation\u2019 and half the room applauded quietly and it became much more of a conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n

It felt like there was an element of bloodymindedness in Nattergal\u2019s purchase of Boothby. The land appeared to be completely emptied of wildlife, and yet so many locals were deeply attached to the intensive farming that had made it so. If Nattergal could make an ecological and financial success of rewilding here, it really could happen anywhere.<\/p>\n

A few months later, the barns were still rattling when I joined an autumnal walk around Boothby to which locals had been invited. Thirty mostly retired people turned up, a good turnout for a sparsely populated area. The wildland had scored an early success, winning a bid to become one of the government\u2019s first 22 Landscape Recovery Schemes<\/a> in England, a new subsidy supporting nature restoration in prime wildlife areas, and Boothby had its first employee based at the farm, Lizzie Lemon, site and community coordinator, a friendly local woman who had once worked for the RSPB. Lemon was spending much of her time trying to alleviate local suspicion that Nattergal was a front for a solar farm. \u201cLocal people see these hedgefund guys coming in and think it\u2019s all going to go wrong and then they will carpet it with solar panels,\u201d she said. Locals viewed fields of solar as the unwelcome industrialisation of their landscape.<\/p>\n

It did not help that Nattergal\u2019s then chief executive, Neil Perry, who joined the walk, had a background in solar. Perry saw the emerging \u201cnatural capital\u201d market as similar to solar. \u201cNo one was listening to pleas to invest in solar \u2013 and then suddenly in 2008-09 mainstream money poured in. All the manufacturing rapidly disappeared to China.\u201d But now, he said, the UK could seize the opportunity to build a domestic industry around biodiversity and carbon credits.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo solar farms?\u201d asked a visitor.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, definitely not,\u201d said Perry. \u201cWe\u2019re not doing that here.\u201d<\/p>\n

A storm blew in and we sheltered under a tree. There were so many acorns beneath the oaks, it felt like walking on marbles. Some of these acorns would soon become the wildland\u2019s first naturally regenerated trees. As we waited for the storm to subside, the walkers interrogated de Klee.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll your weed seed is going to blow into our village,\u201d said one woman.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere will be weed drift,\u201d said de Klee, not missing a beat. \u201cWe have a 50-metre buffer between us and our neighbours, as at Knepp. That won\u2019t stop every seed drift but it will stop a large proportion of it. We have plenty of gardeners around Knepp and their gardens are all very clean and tidy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The locals were divided. A quarter were very enthusiastic (\u201clike winning the lottery\u201d said Clive and Sarah Carr; \u201cOur little girl is five. To have it on your doorstep and grow up with it \u2013 it\u2019s going to be amazing for her,\u201d said Jo Elston-Moscrop). A quarter were implacably opposed. (\u201cPeople think it\u2019s a load of woke nonsense,\u201d said one. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of romantic ideas,\u201d said Jan Worts. \u201cA lot of the young mothers with children in the village have this idea they will be skipping through the daisies.\u201d)<\/p>\n

To these sceptics, Perry quoted a fact from the Dimbleby report<\/a>, an influential government paper that set out a national food strategy in 2021: take the least 20% productive farmland out of production and the calorific value of the food produced in the UK would fall by just 3%. Perry argued that cereal farms such as Boothby did not directly produce food for human consumption. The grain was fed to cows and chickens, while the beans ended up as fish meal for Norwegian salmon and came \u201cback to our tables in M&S salmon packets. If biodiversity loss continues and all our pollinators disappear we\u2019re going to have a much bigger food crisis globally in 10 years\u2019 time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roughly half of local people appeared to be on the fence. One man I met, Paddy Turner, described himself as \u201cpolitely suspicious \u2026 I don\u2019t like to see it going out of agricultural land but equally, I see the benefits,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople don\u2019t like change, that\u2019s the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amanda Dixon\u2019s paddock in the village of Ingoldsby borders Boothby Wildlands. Photograph: Fabio De Paola\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve forgotten more about this land than they are ever going to know, frankly,\u201d declared Amanda Dixon, an elegant, white-haired woman. Dixon and her ex-husband used to own 1,000 acres of Boothby. She still lived on the fringes of the farm, in a converted cart shed, with 11 acres including a field of beloved sheep (hated by the rewilding movement). They had farmed the land well, she said: they innovated, raised yields and did what they could for nature. They planted 20,000 trees in small woods. On some of the better fields, they could grow four tonnes of wheat an acre, \u201cwhich was then the holy grail of farming\u201d. She felt the land\u2019s productivity was being \u201ctalked down\u201d by its new owners. \u201cI do think it should be used for food because we\u2019re going to have to feed ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, she was persuadable. Thirty years ago, nightingales sang from the hedges of Boothby but they had vanished with the loss of bushy habitat. Dixon had told Burrell that she would forgive him for the loss of the farmland on one condition: he got the nightingales back.<\/p>\n

2023<\/p>\n

It was a wet autumnal evening in 2023 when I returned to Boothby. The barns were still rattling in the wind, bleakly. Two-thirds of the fields were now out of production; only 150 hectares would be sown with wheat for the final crop year, in 2024. The agronomist employed by the wildland to oversee its last crops had obtained yields of 9.2 tonnes of wheat a hectare (3.7 tonnes an acre) using 40% fewer \u201cinputs\u201d \u2013 ie, fertiliser \u2013 than the previous regime. \u201cIt turns out we\u2019re quite good at farming this land,\u201d said Lorienne Whittle, the new site manager based at Boothby.<\/p>\n

The rewilders\u2019 messaging had changed because locals had been angered by media portrayals (including my own<\/a>) of this as nature-depleted but also rather rubbish farmland. \u201cWe have to be careful not to say this is bad land. This is resilient farming land,\u201d said Whittle, although she also pointed out that they\u2019d been lucky with the weather over the past two seasons, and the cereals had failed to make a profit in many recent years. (In 2024-25, British cereal farmers actually lost, on average, \u00a327,400 on their crops; they only made profits because of subsidies and diversification \u2013 solar panels, barn rentals, farm shops.)<\/p>\n

I met Boothby\u2019s new ranger, Lloyd Park, at the door. Park was a passionate birder who had worked in traditional conservation for 14 years before switching to rewilding. \u201cTen years ago, I started thinking conservation has got to go in a different direction,\u201d he said. He thought this could be it. Conservation tended to identify a special habitat, with a certain suite of species, and then micro-manage the land to preserve those species. Rewilding<\/a> did not have a specific target, its mantra was to allow more natural processes to flourish, and celebrate abundance and whatever wildlife turned up.<\/p>\n

As nice as that sounded, Boothby was also a pragmatic project. To earn income from BNG and other schemes, it had to deliver rising biodiversity as well as abundance, and so Park and the Boothby Wildland team were intervening to speed up restoration. Brash \u2013 dead tree branches \u2013 was being dumped in the middle of fields so birds perched there and their droppings sowed tree seeds. The riverbed would be filled in, so the stream would be forced out across its former floodplain, bringing water and life to the little valley. The team had also dug eight new ponds, funded in part by Network Rail, which was obliged to provide additional habitat for great-crested newts when its work damaged ponds elsewhere. Three PhDs were being undertaken on site, including examining how rewilding boosts insects and aquatic life.<\/p>\n

The Boothby Wildland mission was also to bring people back to the land; future ecotourism revenues would depend upon that, and Lizzie Lemon had been busy: 150 people attended a dance and open day on the hottest day of the summer and 30 locals were given a free day out at Knepp (and a copy of Tree\u2019s book). I had arrived to watch the latest workshops where local views were canvassed. Under \u201cstrengths\u201d, local people had listed: getting kids back to nature, paths and disabled access, and \u201cbeavers please!\u201d. \u201cWeaknesses\u201d was a larger pile: footpaths need to be managed, footpaths mown too late, weeds, greenwashing, sign at gate too small, \u201cwhat about food production?\u201d and \u201clooks a mess\u201d.<\/p>\n

Lizzie Lemon rewilding Boothby. Photograph: Jonathan Perugia\/Gaia Visual for Nattergal<\/p>\n

Did it look a mess? I took a tour with Whittle in a shiny new four-seater all-terrain vehicle imported from China. Boothby was certainly showing a different face from typical British lowlands. Most fields were filled with weeds that farmers typically hate: tall rosebay willowherb with its bright purple-pink blooms, yellow-flowering ragwort, dock and most of all, thistle. To their detractors, these are thuggish, pasture-murdering plants (and ragwort can be poisonous to horses). Whittle recounted how Boothby\u2019s contract farmer said: \u201cI\u2019m not taking my combine off your land without washing it down thoroughly,\u201d as if the rewilding site was an infectious place of weeds.<\/p>\n

The dumped brash gave it an abandoned look, though if you looked closely, you could see signs of life. A maze of vole runs were etched into the long grass. A stoat ran into the field before us and there was a small murmuration of starlings overhead as well as a kestrel, a buzzard and two red kites. Already, there was a lot more food for all these animals.<\/p>\n

More conventionally, one area was being planted with trees, under a scheme where the government provided generous subsidies for new native woodland, and another field was being managed as a hay meadow. They had spread green hay in 2022, and it was already full of yellow rattle \u2013 a flower that parasitises grasses, creating space for more floral diversity. \u201cIt\u2019s our Lincolnshire steppe grassland,\u201d said Whittle proudly. When we stopped, swallows swooped around our vehicle. \u201cThis is lovely,\u201d said Whittle. \u201cWe\u2019re actually having a wildlife moment! It\u2019s quite rare on the Boothby site.\u201d<\/p>\n

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2024<\/p>\n

A few months later, in February 2024, Boothby hosted another workshop, attended by 18 farmers and landowners, about its controversial next step: bringing back beavers. The wildland team planned to use a digger to rewiggle the river \u2013 recreating \u201cnatural\u201d meanders that had been removed by years of intensive farming, which had turned it into a canalised drainage channel. They would also build the largest beaver enclosure in Britain (because the government did not yet allow the release of this returning native species into the wild in England). They were braced for hostility. Many farmers were very wary of beavers: they had heard how their dams had flooded valuable arable land in Scotland and didn\u2019t want them let loose anywhere else.<\/p>\n

Nattergal\u2019s purpose, in the bloodless language of finance, was \u201cto make nature an investable asset class\u201d. On the ground, however, it felt like a cosier place to be. The farmhouse windowsills were now piled with treasures found on the land: fossils, Roman pottery, coins, horseshoes, musket balls, pipes, cows teeth, a child\u2019s toy lead horse. The kitchen bustled with staff and volunteers. And that winter, ranger Lloyd Park was delighted to have seen a big flock of fieldfares, woodcocks, waxwings, two short-eared owls, regular barn owls and had heard a kingfisher for the first time.<\/p>\n

De Klee gave the farmers the low down on beavers. Their benefits were plentiful: they would make dams, create new wetlands on Boothby\u2019s 2km stretch of river, and slow the flow, ensuring a steady supply of river water in summer and reducing floods in winter.<\/p>\n

With his winning brand of brisk honesty, de Klee noted that there had been 27 beaver releases into fenced enclosures across England during the previous year, and half of them had a beaver escape. He paused. The farmers looked amused. \u201cEvery one has been caught and taken back,\u201d said de Klee. \u201cWe\u2019ve no interest in beavers escaping on to your land because we need them here to do this work.\u201d One landowner also happened to have a 60,000-acre estate in Scotland. They\u2019d shot 120 beavers because they were flooding good cattle grasslands. But the other farmers were keen to learn more about the beavers: how much they breed? (Every year.) How do they affect fish? (Studies show their dams and pools increase fish abundance.) Do they eat eggs of ground-nesting birds? (No.) What about otters? (They live together.)<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat about the hat trade coming back?\u201d laughed one.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mum would be delighted,\u201d said de Klee. \u201cIt would go with her mink coat.\u201d<\/p>\n

The farmers were walked down to the river to see where the beavers would be released. They seemed reassured by what they heard but also by what they saw, which included hedge-laying, mink-trapping and restoring a wildflower meadow. These were pleasingly familiar interventions: management and control, pragmatic custodianship, not freewheeling rewilding.<\/p>\n

\u201cYears ago we were ripping hedges out,\u201d said one farmer. \u201cWe were told to rip them out,\u201d added Dixon. I asked what she thought of the beavers. \u201cIt\u2019s a very good idea. The fencing will be quite something,\u201d she said diplomatically. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine why anybody would be anti the beavers if they are going to be fenced in. It\u2019s not as if you\u2019re releasing a monster.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dixon complained that the weed seeds from Boothby were blowing on to her land but she found that by mob-grazing her sheep in small blocks in the paddocks and letting the grass grow longer the seeds didn\u2019t get in. \u201cWe have adapted,\u201d she said. \u201cYou know what people are like. Something happens and we all go: \u2018Weurrrgh!\u2019 Now it\u2019s happening, people are not worried about it any more. Of course it becomes more interesting when they put animals on it.\u201d She was looking forward to livestock arriving. \u201cThe moment the animals arrive it will be, ahhhh. People will start to think it\u2019s not such a bad idea after all.\u201d<\/p>\n

In September 2024, 12 people, bent double on a recently cultivated field, tending to the land, presented a scene from a century earlier. Except in previous centuries, these labourers would have been pulling out weeds from between newly sown rows, manipulating nature to produce food. The volunteers at Boothby, however, were putting the weeds back in.<\/p>\n

It was another windy day. If you squinted, you could have imagined Boothby\u2019s fields as a trendy garden, with a muted palette of sculptural forms. Statuesque teasels held their grey heads high. Docks were as rusty red as corten steel. The wildland\u2019s final ever meagre wheat harvest had been brought in the previous month.<\/p>\n

This particular field caused controversy earlier in the year because Boothby didn\u2019t use the toxic weedkiller glyphosate on the arable weeds before sowing a wildflower mix (more acceptable \u201cweeds\u201d because they were less aggressive and usually carried prettier flowers). \u201cIt meant we had this real growth of rosebay willowherb, ragwort and thistle, which has caused a lot of upset with the locals,\u201d said Park with a grimace. They had promised wildflower fields. What had sprouted up were the aggressive annual weeds so disliked by many locals. So the field has been cut, ploughed again, and resown with a \u00a36,000 wildflower mix. Now volunteers were spreading green hay, collected from Lincolnshire road verges, which would introduce the right kind of floral weeds: perennial wildflowers of local provenance.<\/p>\n

Fields of ragwort by the village of Ingoldsby. Photograph: Fabio De Paola\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Every week, Lemon and Park were working with a regular group of volunteers on various tasks across Boothby. One of the volunteers was Tabitha Thompson, 19. After she did \u201cterribly\u201d in her A-levels, Thompson was directed her to Boothby by her mother. She was initially tasked with removing the old plastic guards from the small plantations dotted around the farm. Then she dismantled old pheasant pens. Her favourite was learning how to lay a hedge. Her volunteering had led to a good permanent job in the county\u2019s flood management team. But she still spent holiday days at Boothby. \u201cBeavers coming here \u2013 I would love to be involved in that,\u201d she said. The beavers were due next spring.<\/p>\n

2025<\/p>\n

The beavers did not arrive in 2025. Consultations dragged on, expensive fencing was slow to be installed, and I wondered if Nattergal had lost their nerve, or funding. Meanwhile, the wildland\u2019s first glamping offer had not been a success. \u201cA field of thistles in Lincolnshire had limited appeal,\u201d grimaced de Klee. Nattergal promised it would relaunch the ecotourism once there was more wildlife to see.<\/p>\n

That summer, I decided to test the experience in an August heatwave, and turned up with my son, Ted, and our tent for a wild camp on Boothby\u2019s glowing fields of thistles. Thistledown lay like a spilt duvet on the dry ground, which was riddled with cracks as if we might be swallowed up.<\/p>\n

Locals were still complaining about the spread of weed seed from Boothby\u2019s spectacular crop of thistledown, but this was just the ugly duckling phase of a rewilding site. \u201cIt\u2019s the Marmite phase. People either love it or hate it,\u201d said Park. He was in the former camp. But it was only a phase, he said. When pigs are introduced, they will rootle up thistle roots. Trees and scrub will soon shade the thistles and ragwort into insignificance.<\/p>\n

Ted and I circled this still empty, still rather unlovable but now strikingly unusual landscape of shoulder-high thistles, teasels, ragwort and dock. In the distance, at one point, Ted spotted a very strange weed, poking out from the burnt prairie land of tall brown and bleached gold grasses. It was the antlers of a fallow deer, watching us, ears turning like satellites in the hot wind. Further on, spreading hedgerows of hawthorn and blackthorn resembled exhausted shoppers, laden with produce: reddening haws and purpling sloes. Beside the river were barren-looking new ponds dug into the clay and sand by a digger driver whom de Klee had nicknamed \u201cthe Picasso of ponds\u201d. These groundworks had cost \u00a3100,000 \u2013 cheaper than many comparable schemes but not as cheap as leaving river restoration to the beavers.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, Boothby had scored some financial successes in recent months. Nattergal had signed a major deal with engineering consultancy Arup, which agreed to purchase \u00a31m of high-quality carbon removal credits over the coming three decades at Boothby. This price was around three times the market rate for such credits, because the wildland would also deliver biodiversity, flood retention and community engagement. After many delays by the authorities, Nattergal had finally signed a BNG agreement with the local council to offer 338 BNG units. It later added another 1,075 units. BNG prices vary depending on habitats lost, but typically a 20-house development might only require 1.5 units, for which the developer might pay \u00a325,000 a unit. At that price, Boothby\u2019s 1,413 BNG units could be worth more than \u00a335m. With major infrastructure planned for Lincolnshire \u2013 including pylons and battery storage as well as housing \u2013 BNG was likely to provide a steady income over the next 20 years.<\/p>\n

There was no storybook-style cockcrow to wake Ted and me, but we were roused at 5.30am by a roe deer barking outside our tent. We ate breakfast as the sun rose over a peaceful but still-bleak field of thistles.<\/p>\n

2026<\/p>\n

On a sunny day in February, a family of four arrived at Boothby in a white van driven from Scotland, keen to explore their new home. \u201cIt\u2019s an exciting day,\u201d said de Klee, who now looked like a young colonial explorer with his impressive new moustache. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t get better than releasing beavers into this landscape.\u201d Lemon put out a \u201cquiet\u201d Facebook post seeking beaver volunteers. \u201cIt went crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was amazing, said de Klee, how that B-word \u201ccan supercharge interest\u201d. As a very young man, he\u2019d worked on an Indian tiger reserve. \u201cYour job was the prevention of destruction,\u201d he said. His work now was so different: \u201cEnabling recovery. That psychological shift is so wonderful and powerful.\u201d That said, the fencing contractors had churned up the ground during the sodden winter, and there were local complaints about the ugliness of the fencing and the virtually impassable footpaths. On the other hand, this section of the West Glen valley was full of water again, for the first time in a century or more, glinting silver in the sunlight. Volunteers had planted scores of willow whips, which would give the beavers something to eat in the future. Otters had already returned.<\/p>\n

Beavers are finally released at Boothby Wildland. Photograph: Jonathan Perugia\/Gaia Visual for Nattergal<\/p>\n

Four volunteers had their names picked out of a hat to help release the beavers. Covered crates were heaved to a spot beside a brown pond surrounded by bulrushes and trees. Metal hatches were opened, and the family of beavers padded out and slipped into the water. They looked instantly at home. The Boothby team hugged. Some looked close to tears.<\/p>\n

The beavers would deliver wildlife but they were also delivering money. Boothby had created 12 \u201cwatercourse\u201d BNG units for developers building beside rivers elsewhere. These units were rare, in high demand and the beavers were generating a third of them. \u201cIt\u2019s the beaver-created ones that I\u2019m most proud of,\u201d said de Klee. BNG sales had picked up recently. \u201cThe last quarter of last year was anxious and slow,\u201d said de Klee. \u201cThis year there\u2019s a bit of confidence and certainty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last month, I returned to Boothby to see how the beavers were faring. Amanda Dixon was worried. \u201cIs there enough water for them?\u201d she wondered. \u201cThese streams down there don\u2019t run all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I\u2019d met her in previous years, Dixon had sounded as if she was adapting, and perhaps even learning to love Boothby Wildland. But that had changed. \u201cFeelings are running very high,\u201d she said. It was the weeds \u2013 she pointed to the weeds between Boothby\u2019s deer fence and her sheep pasture \u2013 and the fencing. \u201cWe\u2019ve been lied to and lied to about what they were going to do and everybody is getting very angry. They told us we were going to have cattle, which is fine. I know they have them at Knepp. I learned the other day they weren\u2019t going to buy any cattle.\u201d Instead, graziers will bring in cattle on a temporary basis, she said, and there\u2019s currently not enough grass for them to graze because there are so many weeds. For Dixon, the return of livestock to the land was a form of farming again; that it wasn\u2019t happening as originally billed looked like a profound disappointment for her. (When I spoke to Burrell, he said that they\u2019d always been clear that it might take as long as seven years before livestock such as cattle could be permanently introduced.)<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you know what really makes me sick?\u201d said Dixon. \u201cThey\u2019ve been cultivating that land for 1,000 years. We\u2019re surrounded by three churches. Bitchfield has Saxon foundations. They couldn\u2019t have raised those churches if they hadn\u2019t been farming that land. One thousand years of hard labour by generations of people has gone in four years, and they are never going to get it back. Charlie Burrell said: \u2018Think of the purple emperors!\u2019 You can\u2019t eat butterflies.\u201d<\/p>\n

I spoke again to Paddy Turner who, like Dixon, had been initially cautious about the wildland. Four years on, he seemed largely convinced. \u201cIt\u2019s been an absolute pleasure seeing it evolve and change,\u201d he said. \u201cSome people might argue it\u2019s not the most attractive view at the moment but I don\u2019t see that. There\u2019s a lot of docks and thistles, but look at what else is sat on them.\u201d For all that, Turner said he was still \u201can avid sprayer\u201d of weedkiller in his garden, particularly if the wind is blowing the weed seeds on to his land. \u201cBut that\u2019s a first-world problem, it really is. I can\u2019t wait to see the next stage.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few minutes later, I found Park at the farmhouse, almost jumping for joy about the ring ouzel \u2013 an extremely rare thrush \u2013 that had been spotted bathing in a beaver pool. That, and gorse and birch bursting out all over one field. \u201cIt makes your heart sing! \u2013 seeing a little spiny gorse bush in a once-wheat field,\u201d he said. And local complaints? \u201cYou\u2019ve got to be thick-skinned. I\u2019m a rewilding rhino,\u201d he joked, saying his approach was to \u201ckill them with kindness\u201d. When a neighbour complained about the ragwort the other day, the Boothby team offered to send over their volunteers to pull up all the offending \u201cweeds\u201d.<\/p>\n

Charlie Burrell was at Boothby farmhouse too, attending a board meeting in the old dining room. Inside, it was all talk of the shortcomings of carbon credits and investor confidence. Outside he sat in the sunshine on a bench and grinned when I asked if he was surprised by what\u2019s happened here since 2022. \u201cIt all looks exactly how I thought it was going to look. I spent every spare hour at Knepp studying the transition. It all looks so familiar to me. I love it when the staff are surprised \u2013 when hen harriers are seen \u2013 that excitement.\u201d He remembered his conversation with Dixon about nightingales. \u201cThey haven\u2019t bloody come, have they?\u201d he said. \u201cI reckon they\u2019ll arrive in another four years. If they haven\u2019t disappeared from England altogether.\u201d<\/p>\n

He admitted he had been taken aback by the slowness of the financial deals required for their business model. \u201cEverything takes much longer than I thought,\u201d he said. Over the past four years, the political landscape had also been transformed, and Burrell thought it no longer looked so rosy for rewilding. When they raised the initial funds to buy Boothby in 2022, he said, every City of London CEO seemed to be saying: \u201cI have children, I worry about the future and the climate and what biodiversity we had left.\u201d They talked about their responsibilities and working out \u201cthe real cost of using the environment in our lives\u201d. These days, he said, the typical corporate line was: \u201cWe\u2019ll just wait until others are doing this.\u201d There is so much uncertainty about the future, and Burrell noted the backlash against the kind of environment-oriented businesses he championed. But, he said, \u201cit will come good because it will have to, as the true bite of climate change hits\u201d.<\/p>\n

On paper, Boothby\u2019s numbers looked impressive. Nattergal\u2019s 2026 \u201cimpact report\u201d mentioned the 1,413 BNG units added to the national register; 138,000 tonnes of carbon to be sequestered over the next 50 years; a 58% agreed increase in public rights of way; an 108% increase in overall biodiversity and many more figures besides.<\/p>\n

But how did that actually translate on the land? I went for a wander with Park down to the river. The sun broke through and, suddenly, there was a bewildering tumult of life in every direction. I\u2019ve experienced these moments before, but only in special, protected nature reserves \u2013 often such tiny fragments of land that they represent simulacra of abundance. Here, however, we were standing on a large slab of ordinary countryside that until three years ago had been an arable field. Now it was a wetland, roiling with life.<\/p>\n

There was the flap of a grey heron and a grey wagtail\u00a0calling. A black-tailed skimmer dragonfly whizzed over the water. A great spotted woodpecker landed on a dead sycamore. The rank grass and thistles bounced with meadow grasshoppers and jinked with dozens of butterflies. It was overwhelming; movement everywhere, surround-sound buzzing, chirping, calling. To say the land was singing might be fanciful but something was happening here. Something very alive.<\/p>\n

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