Dispelling The Myth Of The Wild

Tristan Søbye Rapp at Noema Magazine:

There are certain places in the world where the boundaries between past and present seem porous, almost arbitrary. The air is cool and quiet in the mornings on the Knepp estate in Sussex, England — quiet, that is, except for the lilt of birdsong and the rumbling beat of hooves. The landscape is one of fields and copses, of dense, tangled shrubbery and shifting, murky pools. The green sward is low and neatly cropped, churned up in many places by the tread of heavy animals. The decade is the 2020s, but it might as well be the 1820s — or a far more ancient era yet. A woman gazing out over the Knepp estate one misty morning might imagine herself looking over a medieval common, or even a vista out of the long-lost Neolithic, and her intuition would not be much wrong. Yet at Knepp, of all places, this deep sense of antiquity is an illusion.

An old European wood-pasture, of the sort Knepp evokes, is an odd thing. It is neither a meadow — with its trees, brambles, high thickets and muddy wallows — nor a forest, being too open, grassy and filled with drifts of budding wildflowers.

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