Into the Wild
Rewilding and the historic environment
What is the Into the Wild Network?
This network brings together an interdisciplinary collaborative partnership of researchers and practitioners from archaeology, cultural geography, nature conservation, land management, and policy. Its outputs will provide a much-needed evidence base on re-wilding within the historic environment. Re-wilding describes an array of global conservation approaches that aim to increase the sustainability of biodiversity, ecosystems, and landscapes and undoubtedly offers huge ecological potential. At the same time, re-wilding changes a landscape’s historic character, which is often tightly interwoven with human histories – and can destroy archaeological evidence, so therefore presents potential threats. Our current understanding of these potential threats is very limited; this network responds to the need for dialogue and guidance for re-wilding projects around the historic environment.
We are pursuing two mutually re-enforcing questions: (1) how is the historic environment impacted by re-wilding projects? (2) how can archaeology contribute to existing understandings of re-wilding, and co-design of projects?
What do we hope to achieve?
We aim to understand the impacts and long-term consequences of re-wilding on the UK’s archaeological record and historic environment[1]. Currently, no baseline research exists on this, and, outside of archaeological circles, there is limited appreciation for the deep historical significance of our landscapes and the value of this knowledge to nature conservation more broadly. There is now an urgent need to engage with these issues because re-wilding is being implemented at a major scale across the UK and beyond, as a nature-based solution to modern environmental challenges. Conceptually, however, re-wilding emerges from a complicated human relationship with the natural world that deserves further scrutiny if we are to understand our relationship to natural systems and decisions taken around these.
Rural and historical significance of landscapes undergoing re-wilding and other nature-based solutions. Re-wilding – especially of our uplands – includes substantive, large-scale, land-use changes, such as species re-introduction, trophic restoration and re-afforestation. These changes are not subject to planning provision, are often unregulated, and undertaken on an ad hoc, landscape scale basis. These practices can cause direct and indirect large- and small-scale damage and destruction of archaeological sites (e.g. prehistoric settlements; boundaries; industrial sites) as well as impacting landscape character through afforestation, new management and landscape shaping, thus adversely impacting historic environments and heritage. Furthermore, the ecological characteristics of these landscapes today are strongly shaped by historical legacies and often integral to the value we assign to these historic environments.
Consequently, there is limited knowledge of how re-wilding may be impacting historic environments; no guidance to re-wilding land managers around maintaining landscape character; how to protect archaeological sites; best practice advice, and limited appreciation of the deep historic significance of our landscapes and their nature conservation significance. We now need new data informed by practices on the ground and the views of land managers and archaeologists. Our network uses a number of approaches to better understand relationships especially to: (i) enhance understandings of re-wilding, including underpinning environmental values; (ii) identify the challenges faced by re-wilded historic environments and by those who manage and regulate them; (iii) promote dialogue between archaeological, re-wilding, and nature conservation communities around good practice; (iv) create guidance papers, with stakeholders, for the co-design and integration of cultural heritage and archaeological expertise into re-wilding projects.
[1] Definitions see: https://www.environment.gov.scot/our-environment/people-and-the-environment/historic-environment/