KEEP WILD AND CARRY ON

A small band of hoteliers is trying to turn back the clock on their lands— all the way to 1,000 years ago

- Nikki Ekstein

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 relevancy really picks up in the 1970s, when the estate’s adjacent holiday spot, Fritton Lake, began to offer tea parties and kayaking for day-tripping locals.

But 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 had been manicured with hedge mazes in the 1840s, work credited to royal gardener William Andrews Nesfield. The story stretches past even the generations of Dutch 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.”