The 3,500-acre Knepp Castle Estate, home of the Burrell family for more than 200 years, was once a traditional arable and dairy farm. No longer – in 2001 Charles Burrell took 500 acres of land out of production, replanting his cornfields with native grasses and wildflowers, and began his ‘re-wilding’ experiment. Drawing inspiration from Oostvaardersplassen, a remarkable nature reserve in the Netherlands, he introduced a herd of Old English Longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, fallow deer and Tamworth pigs, and tore down internal gates and fences to allow the animals to roam at will.
The Knepp Wildland Project has since released another 1,000 acres from intensive farming, with the aim of returning the land to a natural state and producing a minimum-intervention landscape. The next challenge is to restore, or ‘rewild’, the 2.5 km stretch of the River Adur which flows through the estate. This has been heavily modified by more than two hundred years of human activity and was canalised in the 18th century creating a wide, deep, uniform channel largely cut off from its floodplain.
In August 2009 Royal Haskoning was commissioned by the Environment Agency to produce detailed designs for rewilding this reach of the river. Royal Haskoning adopted a partnership approach to ensure success, working closely with the Environment Agency, Natural England, Sussex Wildlife Trust and the Knepp Castle Estate, with technical advice and guidance from the River Restoration Centre at Cranfield University.