Knepp Wildland Foundation

Overview

If one place changed how Britain talks about rewilding, it is Knepp. The 3,500-acre estate near Horsham in West Sussex was heavy clay farmland that never really paid. In 2001 Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree stopped trying to force it, removed internal fences, and let natural processes run.

The Knepp Wildland Foundation is the charity that sits alongside that project. Where the estate manages the land and the visitor business, the foundation carries the public-good side: education, research, access and helping other landowners learn from what happened here.

The Knepp Story

Knepp's approach is process-led rather than target-led. Longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs and deer roam freely, standing in for the aurochs, wild horses and boar that once shaped lowland Britain. Their grazing, rooting and trampling produce a shifting mosaic of scrub, thorny thickets, open grassland and emerging wood pasture.

The results have been striking: nightingales and turtle doves breeding in scrub that a conventional conservationist would have cleared, one of the strongest purple emperor butterfly populations in the country, and the return of breeding white storks through the White Stork Project.

What the Foundation Does

The foundation's focus is on people. That includes school and university visits, hosting research on the estate, running community access programmes, and supporting those who would struggle to reach a place like this otherwise.

Knepp has become an outdoor classroom for anyone interested in nature recovery, and the charity exists so that role does not depend on the visitor business alone.

Weald to Waves

Knepp is also a founding force behind Weald to Waves, an ambitious 100-mile nature recovery corridor linking Ashdown Forest through the Sussex Weald to the sea. The idea is simple and important: isolated rewilded sites are islands, and wildlife needs routes between them.

The corridor depends on hundreds of landowners, from large estates to small gardens, contributing a strip of habitat each. It is one of the clearest examples in England of rewilding scaling beyond a single boundary.

Visiting & Supporting

Wildlife safaris, camping, glamping and walking trails at Knepp are booked through knepp.co.uk, and that income supports the project. To donate to the charity or explore its education and research work, visit kneppwildlandfoundation.org.

Related Grange Project Content

Read our guide to rewilding in England, our profile of the white stork, or return to the rewilding organisations hub.