No doubt about the best assignment of the year. It came when that excellent organisation, the Wildlife Trusts asked me to write about something called the Rothschild List. I’d only vaguely heard about this before. I was pleased to take the job on: but I had no idea at all what it was going to mean to me.
In 1916, Charles Rothschild, founder of the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, helped to put together a list of 284 sites that were “worthy of preservation”. I went to see what had become of them. And by implication, what has happened to our countryside in a century of nature conservation.
My travels gave me an intense affinity with this man before his time, a man who loved the wild world with a profound passion, and who suffered from depression and took his own life at the age of 43. I wished I could have shown him some of the places on the list.
Kynance Cove in Cornwall: still full of strange plants and overflown by ravens performing the corkscrew dance. Kenfig in Wales, where I got lost among the dunes despite the looming presence of the massive steelworks. Orford Ness, where they tested atom bombs, and where I found myself unexpectedly moved by the shingle flora: so much life in so absurdly difficult a place to live.
Harlestone Heath, of which almost nothing is left, and then Hartslock Wood, of which a magnificent fragment still remains – and it’s now full of red kites, birds Rothschild would never have seen in England, showing that some things have actually improved.
I travelled out to Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth on a tourist boat full of children and dogs and shared with them the thousands of gannets flying all around us like angels, and sharing also the love for the wild world that unites us all.
And I had a Waitrose picnic at Rothschild’s table in Rothschild’s cottage in Woodwalton Fen, a place he bought himself to keep it safe… never knowing that a century later it would lie at the heart of the Great Fen Project, a glorious dream of landscape-scale conservation that’s now in full swing.
With each of these places I understood more about conservation and the way it operates across great expanses of time. I also understood that our thinking about landscape changes but our need for the wild world is constant. It took a visionary to realise that in 1916, when such things could be taken for granted.
But now we understand our need for wilderness better: for it’s something that has come from loss. Love and loss: those two matters were at the heart of the ebook I put together. I was sad for all the things we have lost, grateful for all that has been saved — and thrilled beyond measure by the few things that were better, truer, deeper and wilder than they had been before.
On this pilgrimage, I knew hope and sadness as my travelling companions and learned to live with them both. Hope comes from great conservationists, starting with the pioneers like Rothschild, and it continues with the thousands who work in and support conservation today.
But much more than that. As all conservationists know, and as Rothschild would be among the first to realise as well as to say, the real hope lies beyond all of us humans, however heroic. The real hope, the real joy, the real love comes from the wild world itself: from the jay in the ruins of Harlestone, the kites of Hartslock, the butterflies of Kenfig, the great white egret of Orford, the funky heather of Kynance, the gannets of Bass Rock, and for the marsh harrier that flew over Woodwalton Fen and carried on over Rothschild’s cottage, with me inside wishing I could show it to him.
That’s a thing about assignments. Especially the wild ones. Sometimes you get more than you bargained for.
You can buy the ebook at http://wtru.st/1QC3mW3 and download the pdf at www.wildlifetrusts.org/Prophet-and-Loss.
There’s a link to both from the homepage of the Trusts www.wildlifetrusts.org
In 1959-1962 I worked part time at Orford Ness as part of my job. (at Aldermaston and Porton Down as well). It had a nice feel to it even we did not have time to really appreciate it. No radiation involved at all.
It surely is one of the spookiest places in England.
Hi Simon, I enjoyed reading your latest blog. Its celebratory tone is very cheering at this rather bleak time of year. Thank you.
As the great Incredible String Band so truly remarked: ‘Chilly, chilly, chilly, winds blowing… lovely spring coming soon.’
That was an inspiring read Simon thank you, it’s in nature we feel connected and not apart from the world.
That’s the truth.
Thank you for this article Simon -and for “10 Million Aliens” which I really enjoyed reading this year. I now recommend it to our students studying the Animal Diversity module at Cardiff University. I’ve just downloaded your Rothschild e-book -looking forward to it 🙂
Thanks for your kind words and for the recommendations. Really pleased that the book is going out to the people who will be taking over the world soon enough.
Thank you Simon, such apt thoughts for this time of year – love and loss. Wishing you and yours a happy, healthy 2016. Looking forward to more of your wonderful words on the wild world this year.
Thanks for your kind words, i’ll do my best to keep going. Male Marsh harrier on view from my desk today!
Thank you so much for your latest, wonderful blog about the Rothschild List Simon, and for all your inspiring writing which pops up in my emails regularly. I look forward to many more blogs in the new year and wish you and your family peace, good health and happiness for 2016.
Thanks for your kind wishes – and the same to you.
Nice to see a comment about Kenfig. The Steelworks do indeed ‘loom’, but there is so much to see down there. Always enjoy your work. My youngest asked me why birds migrate the other day, and my answers about food weren’t enough so I pointed him to a chapter in ‘Bird Watching With Your Eyes Closed’.
Cheers.
Delighted to have been of service. Kenfig was a strange and really rather moving experience.
I downloaded and managed to read the “Rothschild” book just before we went off to Cuba (or maybe I finished it on the plane. Who knows! Anyway, it was a great read, and now I must track down the sites so that we can explore them. Thanks for the link to the Trust so we can do that.
How splendidly loyal of you. Very glad you enjoyed the Rothschild’s stuff, it was a real pleasure to write.