| Wild Ken Hill | |
|---|---|
 Aerial view of part of Wild Ken Hill, 2011 | |
  Shown within Norfolk | |
| Town/City | Heacham Bottom, Heacham |
| Province | Norfolk |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| OS grid | TF6795435823 |
| Coordinates | 52°53′36″N0°29′49″E / 52.89326°N 0.496961°E |
| Established | 2019 (as Wild Ken Hill) |
| Owner | Buscall family |
| Area | 4,000 acres (1,600 ha) |
| Produces | wheat [1] |
| Website | wildkenhill |
Wild Ken Hill is a rewilding and regenerative agriculture project located in Norfolk, England, at the edge of The Wash. [2] [3]
The name Ken Hill probably derives from a chieftain or landowner with the Anglo-Saxon name Cena. [4] The site has been inhabited from ancient times, with hoards including gold torcs, ingot rings, coins, bracelets and scrap metal from the last two centuries BC being found by archaeologists at Ken Hill. [5] [6] [7]
The farm has been owned by the Buscall family since the 1870s. [8]
The problem in the UK is not that we do not grow enough food. We don’t grow the right food, we waste vast amounts of food (£13bn per year), and we do not distribute it fairly – household food insecurity has actually risen among the most vulnerable in society. Part of the answer is to grow a healthier, more diverse mix of food – currently 85pc of UK farmland is used to supply the meat processing industry. We need to use some of this land for vegetables, nuts, fruit, pulses, which can be grown, supplied and consumed locally, and typically require much less area. We also need to use more land to protect air quality, water quality, the environment, and nature with schemes like rewilding.
Dominic Buscall, Project Manager [9]
Wild Ken Hill is a lowland farm with some grassland, meadow, heathland and shrub. In the middle of the farm, arable farming and intensive grazing have been replaced with low density herbivores (Red Poll cattle, Tamworth pigs, Exmoor ponies). Woodland thinning encourages wood pasture. European beavers have been reintroduced within an enclosure. [10]
The farm also manages freshwater marsh, river valleys and woodland in a traditional manner in the west of the farm. [11] The eastern part of the farm is used for regenerative agriculture, where "we aim to repair soil health to sequester carbon and boost biodiversity, whilst also delivering good, sustainable yields with minimal use of chemical inputs." [12]
Wild Ken Hill was used for the filming of the BBC series Springwatch, Autumnwatch and Winterwatch in 2021–22. [13] [14] [15] [16]
William Edgar Oddie is an English actor, artist, birder, comedian, conservationist, musician, songwriter, television presenter and writer. He was a member of comedy trio The Goodies.
Norfolk is a ceremonial county in the East of England and East Anglia. It borders Lincolnshire and The Wash to the north-west, the North Sea to the north and east, Cambridgeshire to the west, and Suffolk to the south. The largest settlement is the city of Norwich.
Snettisham is a village and civil parish in the English county of Norfolk. It is located near the west coast of Norfolk, some 5 miles (8.0 km) south of the seaside resort of Hunstanton, 9 miles (14 km) north of the town of King's Lynn and 45 miles (72 km) northwest of the city of Norwich.
Castle Espie is a wetland reserve managed by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) on the banks of Strangford Lough, three miles south of Comber, County Down, Northern Ireland, in the townland of the same name. It is part of the Strangford Lough Ramsar Site. It provides an early wintering site for almost the entire Nearctic population of pale-bellied brent geese. The Castle which gave the reserve its name no longer exists.
Animal husbandry is the branch of agriculture concerned with animals that are raised for meat, fibre, milk, or other products. It includes day-to-day care, selective breeding, and the raising of livestock. Husbandry has a long history, starting with the Neolithic Revolution when animals were first domesticated, from around 13,000 BC onwards, predating farming of the first crops. By the time of early civilisations such as ancient Egypt, cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs were being raised on farms.
Britain Goes Wild with Bill Oddie is a live BBC TV show, broadcast nightly, Monday – Thursday, from 31 May 2004 to 17 June 2004.
Dorset Wildlife Trust (DWT) is a wildlife trust covering the county of Dorset, United Kingdom. The trust was founded in 1961 as Dorset Naturalists' Trust, to protect and conserve the wildlife and natural habitats of the county.
Terence Paul Nutkins was an English naturalist. He appeared in the UK children's programmes Animal Magic, The Really Wild Show, Brilliant Creatures and Growing Up Wild.
Springwatch, Autumnwatch and Winterwatch, sometimes known collectively as The Watches, are annual BBC television series which chart the fortunes of British wildlife during the changing of the seasons in the United Kingdom. The programmes are broadcast live from locations around the country in a primetime evening slot on BBC Two. They require a crew of 100 and over 50 cameras, making them the BBC's largest British outside broadcast events. Many of the cameras are hidden and operated remotely to record natural behaviour, for example, of birds in their nests and badgers outside their sett.
Michaela Evelyn Ann Strachan is an English television presenter and singer.
Katherine Mary Humble is an English television presenter and narrator, mainly working for the BBC, specialising in wildlife and science programmes. Humble served as president of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) from 2009 until 2013. She is an ambassador for the UK walking charity Living Streets.
Christopher Gary Packham CBE is an English naturalist, nature photographer, television presenter and author, best known for his television work including the CBBC children's nature series The Really Wild Show from 1986 to 1995. He has also presented the BBC nature series Springwatch, including Autumnwatch and Winterwatch, since 2009.
Torc Mountain, at 535 metres (1,755 ft), is the 329th–highest peak in Ireland on the Arderin list. It is a popular mountain for hill walkers as it has a stone or boarded path from its base at Torc Waterfall to its summit, which has views of the Lakes of Killarney. Torc Mountain is part of the Mangerton Mountain Group range in County Kerry, Ireland.
Iolo Tudur Williams is a Welsh ornithologist, nature observer, television presenter and author, best known for his BBC and S4C nature programmes, working in both English and his first language of Welsh. After a 14-year career with the RSPB, in 1999 Williams became a full-time TV presenter. He has written a number of books about the natural world.
Gordon John Buchanan is a Scottish wildlife filmmaker and presenter. His work includes the nature documentaries Tribes, Predators & Me, The Polar Bear Family & Me and Life in the Snow.
Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration aimed at increasing biodiversity and restoring natural processes. It differs from ecological restoration in that, while human intervention may be involved, rewilding aspires to reduce human influence on ecosystems. It is also distinct in that, while it places emphasis on recovering geographically specific sets of ecological interactions and functions that would have maintained ecosystems prior to human influence, rewilding is open to novel or emerging ecosystems which encompass new species and new interactions.
Martin Hughes-Games is a natural history programme producer, presenter and author. He is best known for co-presenting the BBC magazine-style nature series Springwatch and its spin-offs, Winterwatch, Autumnwatch, and Springwatch Unsprung.
Lindsey Katherine Chapman is an English television and radio presenter.
Knepp Wildland is the first major lowland rewilding project in England. It comprises 1,400 hectares of former arable and dairy farmland in the grounds of Knepp Castle, in West Sussex, England.
The wood-pasture hypothesis is a scientific hypothesis positing that open and semi-open pastures and wood-pastures formed the predominant type of landscape in post-glacial Europe, rather than the common belief of primeval forests. The hypothesis proposes that such a landscape would be formed and maintained by large wild herbivores. Although others, including Oliver Rackham, who criticised the idea of an all-encompassing, dark primeval forest in pre-neolithic Europe, had previously expressed similar ideas, it was Dutch researcher Frans Vera, who, in his 2000 book Grazing Ecology and Forest History, first developed a comprehensive framework for such ideas and formulated them into a theorem. Vera's proposals, although highly controversial, came at a time when the role grazers played in woodlands was increasingly being reconsidered, and are credited for ushering in a period of increased reassesment and interdisciplinary research in European conservation theory and practice. Although Vera largely focused his research on the European situation, his findings could also be applied to other temperate ecological regions worldwide, especially the broadleaved ones.