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Recently showing at arts cinemas around the UK is a documentary called Wilding, which tells the story of how Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell decided in 2001 to let nature take its course on their 1,400ha estate at Knepp in West Sussex, abandoning the conventional farming practices of soaking the land in herbicides, insecticides, and fertiliser in order to grow loss-making crops. Some 23 years later, the farm is home to turtle doves, nightingales, barn owls, and the first wild storks to have bred in Britain in 600 years, as well as bumble bees, bats, beavers, beetles, and butterflies (rare white admirals and purple emperors). The soil is now healthy again, rich in fungal organisms, worms, and the things that eat them.
If you missed the documentary, you can read the award-winning book of the same name by Isabella Tree. However, the film is worth seeing for such visually striking moments as the occasion in 2009 when the land was infested with the fast-spreading creeping thistle, which can easily come to dominate grassland if not controlled. That same year saw a huge migration of painted lady butterflies from North Africa into Europe, with an estimated 11 million arriving in the UK alone. It just so happens that creeping thistle is the favoured food plant of painted lady caterpillars, who promptly cleared Knepp’s fields and left them free of thistles from that time on. Clever retrospective photography in the film dramatises the magical moment when the butterflies arrive.
The film also shows landscapes that are of interest to any archaeologist wanting to understand the character of Mesolithic and Neolithic Britain. First, there is an abundance of food in the form of the longhorn cattle, red deer, and Tamworth pigs that have been let loose on the estate. Left to themselves, the animals breed and build up numbers rapidly; hunter-gatherers would not have wanted for food. Second, these grazing animals prevent the landscape being covered in dense woodland. Instead, they create a landscape of grassy glades, scrub (important for protecting birds and oak seedlings), and parkland trees. Third, they form clearly delineated and well-worn paths across the landscape, answering the question posed by Martin Bell (see CA 367) about how people managed to travel long-distances before the mass tree-clearance that began with the Neoltihic – just follow the animal tracks.
Natural and cultural heritage
It is easy to be seduced by the Knepp vision, especially when presented in such a compelling film (part of the drama comes from the opposition of officialdom to the Knepp project, and of neighbouring landowners who fear the spread of pernicious weeds and out-of-control animals, like the boar in the film that gatecrashes a wedding held on the estate). However, one must remember that it is an experiment in its infancy – 23 years is no time at all in the life of a landscape, and it will be interesting to see what Knepp looks like after 50 years or a century.
But, most important of all, one cannot escape the fact that the human hand is everywhere on the estate: the apparent ‘wildness’ depends entirely on the decisions made by humans about what animals to stock (predators are largely absent) and when to cull them (the meat sells at a premium, providing a valuable income for the estate along with the rental of holiday properties, guided tours of the estate, book sales, film and photography rights, weddings, and events). Tom Williamson, who has spent his entire career as an archaeologist at the University of East Anglia studying landscape and agricultural history argues in his English Orchards book (see here) that it is management that promotes diversity, not neglect. Tom would describe Knepp not as a wild landscape, but rather a minimally managed one.
Tom developed this theme in an article in the May 2022 issue of the journal British Wildlife, in which he invites those who work in natural heritage and nature conservation (with all the clout and spending power that comes from government funding) to work much more closely with archaeologists to understand what works best for nature: not the absence of human influence, but human and natural history combined.
As Hoskins famously wrote in 1954 in The Making of the English Landscape, that complex mosaic of countryside features – hedges, woodland, fields and commons, orchards, churches and old houses, mills, rivers, canals, quarries, footpaths – constitutes the ‘richest historical document we possess’. At the same time, they are the basis for ‘regenerative farming’, an approach to agricultural practice and wildlife conservation that respects and builds on the historical character of the landscape.
Archaeology in churches and museums
There are many other areas in life apart from wildlife and farming policy that would benefit from greater engagement with archaeologists. For example, people training to be ministers of religion receive a rigorous training in matters theological, but none whatsoever in the management of a listed building. This surely needs to change, and there are plenty of national heritage societies that would gladly put together material for use in religious training centres.
Equally, the separation between archaeologists and museum professionals that began in the 1970s has now gone far too far. That is not to decry the museum professionals’ concentration on community engagement and educational work, but often this has been at the expense of an understanding of the objects that make up museum collections.
Sherds recently attended a lecture in which the speaker enthused about decolonisation as a creative process that would lead to a fuller and more rounded account of objects with fascinating biographies. This can only be welcomed if it means rediscovering the centrality of the collections and doing what archaeologists do: seeking to understand the whole object and the many meanings it has acquired through time, including its most recent provenance as part of a museum display. This is surely far preferable to the stripping out of ‘contentious’ objects and leaving empty cases – already, too many museum displays have been reduced to a cartoon-like narrative and a dressing-up box.
A museum that tackles these issues in a positive manner is the Musée du quai Branly, in Paris. The museum does not shy away from the fact that many of the objects were acquired through colonial practices that would be unacceptable today, and it works with the communities from which the objects were acquired to understand their meanings.
At the same time, it makes plain that some of these communities have lost their connections to the practices of the past: Christianisation has severed their link with traditional beliefs. People from those communities are as keen as everyone else to know the full story of the objects that were created and used by their ancestors, and are grateful to the museum for seeking to bring these objects to life – one of many good reasons to support and celebrate museums that recognise this to be a central role, rather than hiding objects away and thus impoverishing everyone’s understanding.
In praise of small museums
The Musée du quai Branly is what Sherds would call a two-day museum, because one day is not enough to take in all of its well-explained ethnographic displays. By contrast, The Guardian recently published an editorial in praise of the UK’s 2,500 small museums, which it described as ‘embattled but valiant institutions’, largely dependent on volunteers and many of them desperate for funds just to keep the lights switched on. Among the examples cited by the newspaper are museums devoted to pens (Birmingham), dog collars (occupying a former stable block at Leeds Castle, in Kent), cuckoo clocks (Tabley, in Cheshire), and lawnmowers (‘a multi award-winning quintessentially British attraction’, at Southport), all of them ‘testimony to a basic human urge to collect and share enthusiasms’.
And new museums keep on coming, despite the struggle to remain financially sustainable. The Museum of Homelessness, founded in 2015, has (paradoxically) just found a permanent home in Finsbury Park after ten years on the road as a touring exhibition. The objects in the museum have been donated by people living on the streets to symbolise their stories, to humanise what it is like to be homeless, and to change public perceptions of those who are homeless. ‘It’s a huge part of our culture’, says co-founder Jess Turtle, who grew up in a community for the homeless in Cardiff.
