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These Luxury Hoteliers Are Trying to Return Britain to the Beasts

These Luxury Hoteliers Are Trying to Return Britain to the Beasts

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Depending on whom you ask, the tale of Somerleyton Hall begins in 1863, the 1970s, or hundreds of years earlier. For William Crossley, third baron of Somerleyton and the late owner of the Jacobean manor in East Anglia, England, it originated in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, when his grandfather, a carpet manufacturing magnate, purchased the property at a steal from a down-on-his-luck baronet. For most residents of the neighboring North Sea fishing towns, Somerleyton’s relevance really picks up in the 1970s, when the estate’s adjacent holiday spot, Fritton Lake, began to offer tea parties and kayaking for daytripping locals.

These Luxury Hoteliers Are Trying to Return Britain to the Beasts

Hugh Crossley, who inherited the Somerleyton estate after his father’s death in 2012, says both stories start much too late. When he looks at the property, he sees back hundreds of years, long before the home’s expansive grounds were manicured with hedge mazes in the 1840s, work credited to royal gardener William Andrews Nesfield. The story stretches past even the generations of Danish and Norse home­steaders who tilled the land and made it their own.

Crossley winds the clock to the turn of the last millennium, when nothing existed other than a patchwork of towering pine and birch trees, lowland heath, and ­yellow-flowered gorse. If it were up to him—and it is, mostly—that’s what Somerleyton’s grounds would look like today.

Crossley is among a small but growing number of trailblazers shaping Britain’s nascent rewilding movement, which aims to return denuded farmland and deforested areas to their native state by removing invasive species and replanting and reintroducing native ones. “People have forgotten what the land looks like when it’s not managed,” he says. “It’s all overgrazed or overfarmed.”

This is true all across the U.K. Many country houses such as Somerleyton use farming as a way to finance high-­maintenance properties; the Downton Abbey plotline in which Lord Grantham considers selling off land to local farmers echoes scenarios that have played out across the country since the early 1900s. These estates’ humbler neighbors tend to be even more dependent on intensive agriculture, which uses ground-polluting fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and year-round harvesting to milk the land for every ounce of return. This type of farming strips the soil of nutrients, deters wild flora and fauna, and supplants the heirloom and organic crop cultivation that worked for thousands of years before the modern tractor was invented.

These Luxury Hoteliers Are Trying to Return Britain to the Beasts

Rewilding attempts to reverse all that, not for the sake of nostalgia but for a more viable future. Crossley and other landowners are increasingly aware that the degradation of topsoil and erosion is a threat to our food supply, as well as to clean water, clean air, and carbon sequestration.

Some prior efforts to rewild have taken hold, primarily in Europe. A Yellowstone National Park-size patch of Romania’s Carpathian Mountains has been restored to virgin forest after years of ­illegal logging. And there’s the reintroduction of almost extinct Pyrenean brown bears to a formerly blighted habitat along the northern coast of Spain. Both endeavors, initiated by local conservationists and nongovernmental organizations, have received the ongoing backing of the European Nature Trust, a philanthropic group that furniture tycoon and ­rewilding pioneer Paul Lister set up two decades ago. The same principles have also been used for decades to restore habitats and wildlife throughout Africa.

Rewilding has had notable failures, too, such as a marshland restoration project outside Amsterdam, where the flora couldn’t keep up with the grazing needs of a ballooning wild horse and cattle population. In that controversial case, thousands of animals were shot to spare them from starvation. And ­rewilding will never restore habitats as they existed centuries ago, when currently endangered or extinct species such as European bison and woolly mammoths acted like natural lawn mowers by feeding on overgrown plants. Nor is it feasible to introduce lynx, wolves, and other apex predators to unfenced, densely populated areas—though they are critical to restoring the old order.

All this makes rewilding a complicated experiment, limited by cost, by damage that’s already been done, and by the number of people willing to donate land. Done right, it can show fast dividends. When Crossley got started in 2006, he created a 250-acre test site. Once choked with invasive thickets, it’s now covered with lush woodland buzzing with the sounds of insects and birds. Between his own purse and government grants, he’s spent about $125,000 on the project. The sum has helped him fence in almost 1,000 acres, rip out rhododendrons planted by Victorian gardeners in the 19th century, and replace them with naturally occurring heather and oak seedlings. Near the lake, where the purple-blooming bushes had overtaken essential reed grasses, the waters have visibly cleared, allowing guests to swim and kayak again.

These Luxury Hoteliers Are Trying to Return Britain to the Beasts

Even for an aristocratic landowner such as Crossley, it can be a financial quagmire. Bringing in tourists to pay $200 a night helps, though attracting them required a $2 million, top-to-bottom renovation of the Fritton Lake property. The goal, he says, is to engage a new, “eco-anxious” generation of visitors and have them help shoulder the costs.

Julie Danziger, the managing director of travel consultant Embark Beyond, says this is exactly the type of experience travelers will crave when Covid-19 lockdowns give way again to open borders and transatlantic explorations. “Being in quarantine has helped people develop an appreciation for life and nature,” she says. “We have an overwhelming number of people looking to reconnect with the great outdoors.”

Crossley has joined a handful of entrepreneurs in the U.K. who’ve crossed over into hospitality in recent years. He took inspiration from Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree of Knepp Castle Estate, a Regency-style mansion in Sussex with treehouses and safari tents amid 3,500 regenerated acres, and from the European Nature Trust’s Lister, whose five-star hotel, Alladale, helps fund a 23,000-acre rewilding project in the Scottish Highlands.

These Luxury Hoteliers Are Trying to Return Britain to the Beasts

Crossley sees Lister’s Alladale as the template for what he hopes to achieve at Somerleyton Hall. At Alladale, several cottages scattered around an 1877 Victorian hunting lodge offer idyllic accommodations for guests who want to be surrounded by nature or go on daily guided hikes. The on-site, farm-driven restaurant has planned guest-chef appearances by Francis Mallmann and Marco Pierre White.

Weekly stays, starting at about $2,100, help fund Lister’s ambitious goal to reintroduce the European gray wolf, which in turn would restore the ecosystem’s natural food chain and bolster tourism. “Bringing wolves back into Yellowstone has yielded an extra $40 million in tourism revenues there,” Lister explains. But doing the same here would require 50,000 contiguous acres of enclosable land. “The roadblock is scale,” he says.

These Luxury Hoteliers Are Trying to Return Britain to the Beasts

For that, Crossley has his own solution. In conjunction with former European Nature Trust director Duncan Grossart and two other trustees, he’s founded an initiative called Wild East. It educates local youth about rewilding and encourages farmers to rethink their land usage. “Rewilding can’t just be about the privileged few,” Grossart says. “The integrity of soil is in danger. Our crop supply is becoming limited.” The key, he believes, is banding together to persuade other landowners toward a model that blends organic farming with ­sustainable travel experiences.

Luxury tourism is the key variable in the rewilding equation, Grossart adds. “It makes people aware; it changes [guests’] behaviors at home. Maybe it inspires them to write a million-dollar check. It’s the catalyst we need.”

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