‘Rewilding’ is currently a hot topic in conservation, but it has been happening for decades, virtually unnoticed, in the many abandoned pockets of land across the country. James Robertson describes how the landscape and wildlife of north-west Wales have been shaped by agricultural and forestry policy over the past two centuries.
In the introduction to his father’s book, The Story of a Norfolk Farm (Williamson 1986), Richard Williamson wrote that, when his father started farming in Norfolk in 1937, talk of damage to wildlife from agri-business was inconceivable. British farming was bankrupt.