Rewilding Wales…on a budget
Hello, we are a bonkers but idealistic Good life (if Felicity Kendal were Asian) middle class London family with no farming experience. We find ourselves rethinking the way we run our hospitality business during Covid. Over Lockdowns 1 and 2, we realised that our efforts to run our wilderness glamping and barn stays, (chillderness.co.uk) over the last 12 years, had ignored the fact we are de facto custodians of a magnificent but destroyed 80 acres of clear-felled forest backing on to a remote, beautiful but barren piece of Common land [also known as the Desert of Wales]. Till now, we have always thought that Red Kite barn, sitting in the Sheltered Valley, Cym Clyd, belonged to us {and a few banks}, and treated the 80 acres which come with it, as a giant unweeded garden. Lockdown 3 brought with it the damascene revelation that it is actually we who belong to it and have a job to do.
Over the next three years, can we overcome the odds, turn the bleak 'Desert of Wales’ into a Celtic Serengeti, and win the race to become the first location in Wales to host beavers? Set up a herd of breakaway Carneddau ponies, native to Snowdonia to save their gene pool? And work with the animals to rewild the landscape?
This is a once in a lifetime pandemic-imposed opportunity to try and regenerate the original open grassland, pastureland and forest of the Cambrian Mountains using the original native, ponies, pigs and cattle. Can we also impact the Common land in any way by using our long lost Commoner’s rights?
We BELIEVE we can literally change the landscape
We THINK we can also create and dig a wet-land paradise
But as usual with our projects we HAVE to do this on a shoestring budget.
We are looking for
We are looking to assemble a creative team which would like to share the experience of rewilding Red Kite by making a docu-drama with us following its progress over, say, the next three years. We potentially have on board a 15 year old ornithologist who has appeared on BBC Winterwatch, and is incredibly bright, as visiting bird expert and believe other guests and visits could be fascinating. [ Have ideas]. Scope for visiting other projects for ideas, exchange etc.
Our part in the Waste Land
“In my end is my beginning”
Three years ago we were poised to replant the forest we had been offered a lot of money destroy, but were simultaneously shafted by an unscrupulous firm of London lawyers to the tune of an eye-watering £200 grand. Replanting a new upland forest was not as high a priority as saving ourselves and our fledgeling business from bankruptcy.
Then, with Red Kite firmly locked down 1, I began to enjoy some time working there. I read my guests’ reviews of the stunning countryside, yet the deforested hill opposite stared at me, skeletal, littered with brash and the ubiquitous marsh grass. Just three trees, which had housed buzzards, had been spared. The glorious mixology of bird song emerged invisibly from the trees immediately round the barn and my heart hummed alongside. But the plant life and tree scape just didn’t make me feel good. Something was missing for me which I just couldn’t pin-point despite everyone’s wholehearted endorsements. Lockdown 2, with our once more empty colourful glamping shells, I realised what it was.
No flowers.
No other colour.
No biodiversity.
Inadvertently and innocently we had killed it all and I suddenly felt it was my duty to put it back.
My first response was to throw money at it and interfere. I rushed and planted 1500 trees and hedges in November and began to dig a lake. I thought about wildlife but mainly I thought about winter colour...copper beech, shaking aspen and wild cherry and a very wildlife friendly hedge line, dogrose, sloes, hawthorn, buckthorn, crab apples. But when the lake proved like digging gravy, then I took a step back and thought about rewilding.
Three years of neglect should – in rewilding theory at least – have seen the bees buzzing and the birds flocking to paradise. In fact, we had 40 acres of silent, post-apocalyptic wasteland and a muddy man-made pond that looks like a sperm. Why? Rewilding alone when there has been monoculture of both flora and fauna has resulted essentially in Welsh tumbleweed: marsh grass rolling over the saturated lands.
So this is where our team, the Devoys plus talented and telegenic 15 year old naturalist Indy Green [ as featured on BBC’s Winterwatch come in as SPECIES BUSTERS.
What we hope to do
Together we have SPECIFIC goals of…
1. Establishing a small breeding herd of the endangered Carneddau ponies with a programme we are co-creating with the Snowdonia farmers so they are protected from flood and famine in the North of Wales. First ponies coming in end Feb. and opportunity to film round up for the brood mares in Nov 2021.
2. Entering the race to house Wales’ reintroduced first beavers and creating a wonderful wetland area instead of a swamp but if not we can fence off our river if we can only get a licence.
3. Bird habitat proliferation. With Indy, we can with him consulting on all the ways we (and by extension viewers) can enhance the habitat and encourage wildlife into the land we manage, whether it is 3500 acres at Knepp, 81 at Cym Clyd or a window box in Peckham. Indy’s job would be to keep tabs on progress and species.
This series has both scientific and entertainment merit. Indy is going to cringe when I write this but Indy, is also an example of a teen who spends lots of time outside and has lots to say and overall is just a great role model.
We are looking to team up
Creative, passionate, individuals, a production company, director and broadcaster, knowledgeable about wildlife, who could join with us to format a programme which follows the seasons, the changes to the landscape over maybe 3 years and produce the show. We think there is a lot of interest in rewilding and we think that working with Indy who is young and fresh, we, the weatherbeaten Devoys, will provide a humorous backdrop and catalyst to change. All in stunning scenery atop the Cambrian mountains. This could make a different more entertaining programme to the genus of environmental awareness broadcasting.
In haste, if we want to make any difference this year, we need to cut back all the marsh grasses three times before May, do some wet land planting and introduce some animals – so time is of the essence.
We envisage being more like executive producers and imagine, then that rather like Grand Designs format if we come across a problem we can then try and invite or visit interesting rewilders or pioneers in foraging like our friend Pembrokshire chef Matt Powell or Derek Gow of Bring back the Beavers, to find solutions. Indy says though they are few they are all very interesting.
Our experience: what we offer
We are of course influenced by the Knepp project but we are not part of the landed gentry and hence more relatable to. Part of our scheme will be to show people how they can be more aware. I can’t wait to visit Knepp though and talk to Isabella Tree.
We are authentic: it’s our land even though we come from the Tom and Barbara Good class. All our recent construction projects (our company is Chillderness Retreats) have been in hostile environments: Wales, the French Alps.
Entertainment. So much wildlife programming is earnestly academic. We’ll actually be out there rolling up our sleeves and getting knocked back by every mud-smeared tragedy.
We’re experienced blunderers, with ‘the stamina and determination of the Great British Eccentric’ – according to Kevin McCloud.
Memorable presenters. We know we’re capable of carrying a programme (Grand Designs, hanging tree tents on George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces, This Morning, The World’s Most Extreme Homes, and our chalet on La Maison on France5) with a hilarious creative tension between David and Anjana.
The theme seems often to be: we take on yet another impossible project; will we succeed? And to be honest this is how we run our lives.
Who’s who?
Indy: half boy half bird. Passionate naturalist and ornithologist and special advisor.
Anjana: the slave-driver, the dreamer, a force of nature; deeply impractical and highly opinionated. The only Indian farmer in Powys. Her parents never let her ride but, as a Sagittarian, stubbornly remained a passionate horsewoman. Executive producer and front-woman.
David: determined have-a-go Welshman, barrister turned builder, who has now built three houses in hostile environments. The voice of reason.
Inigo: middle son, devil’s advocate, the little grit that makes the pearl in the oyster. Also surely the gayest, most literary labourer you’ve met.
Orlando: eldest son. The quiet, organised one who keeps the show on the road, and keeps Anjana’s feet on the ground.
Avalon: the stroppy, multi-lingual teenager doing her GCSEs. 16 turning 36 – who greets everything we’re doing with utmost cynicism.
Adam: the London lodger, friend and foil stuck to us in Lockdown bubble. Executive producer.
Topology: Red Kite Barn
We have a wonderful stretch of river, where the trees we planted 15 years ago straggle but provide a perfect habitat for beavers if the lake doesn’t work out, so again, not all bad. We are a pretty organic family and like nature, if one thing doesn’t work out we go for another. I identify with nature, not people!
We are in talks with the Beaver Trust, which happens to be in our local town, to do a feasibility study on their introduction. I always wanted an island to row to like everyone who loved reading children’s books in the 70s. And I wanted a horse and I’m going to have 10, 4 at the end of February, thus making up for lost time.
Red Kite Barn backs on to one of the biggest areas of common land this side of Scotland and yet, the lamb, both beloved and symbolic of Wales, and god has by its strength, adaptability and lack of predators, destroyed and out survived all but the hardiest of the native species of animal and plant.
The stumps and detritus of the trees lie untouched whilst the rough tough reed grass has sprung up in the ground which has turned to bog now the trees have gone. The wool, the wealth of England past dominates. Can we help rebalance this?
Not everyone has acres of land. But this series will aim to give people ideas of how to re-wild their little corner of home, on a shoestring budget as they watch a bunch of lovable blunderers learn as we go, and make a lot of mistakes as we battle to return our land to the wild.
Possible format
12 part project, 4 episodes created each year, filmed over three years with scope for updates and spin-offs (book, blog, podcast, merchandise, conservation cause)
Each episode is one season of the year
Genres: lifestyle, nature/conservation
Low-cost, high entertainment value reality TV documentary
The ultimate goal: can we be the first place in Wales to reintroduce beavers?
An opportunity for viewers to see a landscape change in real time
Each episode is an experiment in re-wilding or conservation, with some featuring explanations of conservation techniques, flashes into different conservation projects/countries (e.g. Knepp Estate, Forest Coalpit Farm, Oostvaardersplassen, Highgrove, Exmoor Pony Trust, Daylesford, Durslade Farm)
Potential for eminent guest experts on nature/conservation like Derek Gow, Isabella Tree, The Prince of Wales, David Attenborough, Monty Don
Dramatic colour from local ‘glitterati’ of Joel the Forester, Martin The Tractor Gwilym, and Francis, Martin’s wife and implacable head of the Powys common land grazing committee
Wales pioneers alternative projects in energy and conservation, but hides its light under a bushel. We want to showcase the magic of Wales to the rest of the world
Project details
WATER. Restore an upland water landscape, and ultimately a habitat to reintroduce beavers to Wales, also solving the problem of boggy land and flooding. (We are already working with the Welsh Beaver Trust, who are conducting a feasibility study on our land.)
LAND. Kickstart a trophic cascade which spills onto the Cambrian Mountains, reviving our defunct grazing rights by putting wild ponies and cows to re-wild the biggest moorland in the UK south of Scotland.
AIR. See which bird and insect species we can attract, probably in year 2. We already have an abundance of red kite, barn owls and nuthatches, showing that recovery is possible.
SOIL. Working out where we’ve done right and where we’ve gone wrong. Solve the problem of how to regenerate land that has been stripped bare of nutrients and species by generations of over-grazing and monoculture timber forestry.
Timeline so far
WINTER 2020-21. All journeys start with destruction. We were absolutely brassic. Thanks to Covid, our business has gone up in smoke. Locked down in London, Anjana feels the call to nature and rings the ‘beaver woman’. We attempt to dig a lake and finally re-plant our lost trees. Over-grazing has killed everything. But we just replaced one monoculture with another (conifers -> marsh grass) and now need to solve the problem.
SPRING 2021. Green shoots and leaves. Time for a new approach. We try nature-led re-wilding rather than imposing trees and lakes as if we were Victorian gardeners on a grand scale. But what to do about the sodding marsh grass? We find out we have to cut it down THREE TIMES before May. By hand. 40 acres of it. We look at getting mountain ponies and ancient breeds of pigs – we’re doing everything arse about face as usual. The ponies should be here by the end of February to help us get rid of the grass.
