Knepp
“In West Sussex, something is returning. Nobody planted it. Nobody planned it. They just… stopped.”
The story behind the song
Knepp is a 1,400-hectare (3,500-acre) estate in West Sussex that was farmed intensively for most of the twentieth century. In 2001, its owners, Sir Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, stopped conventional farming and let the land follow its own course instead, using free-roaming grazing animals, longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs and red deer, as proxies for the wild herbivores that would once have shaped the landscape. Isabella Tree's book Wilding documents the project's early, often difficult years.
The results, more than two decades on, are widely cited as one of the clearest demonstrations of what rewilding can do on land that most people would call unremarkable. Turtle doves, in steep decline nationally, went from around two singing males on the estate in 2008 to twenty-two by 2024, against a backdrop of a 98% UK-wide decline in the species since 1994. Purple emperor butterflies, nightingales, nightjars and nesting white storks have all returned. In 2020, a pair of storks raised chicks at Knepp, the first wild hatching recorded in England for around 600 years. Beavers, reintroduced to the estate, were the first to live wild in Sussex in roughly 400 years, and their dam-building has since created ponds that appear to be drawing in more songbirds still.
The song's chorus, “the land is remembering,” reflects Knepp's own framing of the project: not a managed nature reserve with fixed targets, but a piece of land left to find its own dynamic equilibrium, with people stepping back rather than directing the outcome.
- Rewilding
- An approach to conservation that aims to restore natural processes, such as grazing, flooding and predation, rather than managing a landscape toward a fixed target habitat or species list.
- Process-led restoration
- Knepp's own term for its method: enabling ecological processes to happen, and allowing the outcome to be shaped by the land and its wildlife rather than by a management plan.
Sources
Rewilding Britain. (n.d.). Knepp Castle Estate rewilding project. rewildingbritain.org.uk
Knepp Wildland. (n.d.). Rewilding at Knepp. knepp.co.uk
Goodyear, S. (2026, March 9). Once ‘polluted and dysfunctional,’ Knepp Estate has become a haven for wildlife. CNN.