Coming Home to Wildness

There is something awakening, bracing, enlivening about an encounter with true untamed wildness. It is a feeling that we can rarely experience in this country, deprived as it is of large expanses of completely untouched countryside by continual residential or industrial developments. But when you do feel it, it is like coming home. It is as if our bodies and minds are greeting an old friend which they have lost contact with. As the warmth of the sun kisses our skin, the wind’s breath caresses our limbs and our eyes feast on nature’s feral beauty, we realise on an elemental level just what we have been missing.

While this sense of wildness is scarce in our cultivated land, there are places within reach which give us a taste of the natural world’s breathtaking, awe-inspiring, spine-tingling undomesticated form.

One such place in our patch is Wicken Fen. This magnificent, wind-beaten, wildlife abounding area of wetland provides a window into an all but lost landscape. Wicken Fen is one of the last remnants of undrained fenland. The vast majority of the low-lying marshy fens were drained several hundred years ago but the National Trust has committed to maintaining areas of currently undrained fen and rewetting other areas to create a rich network of wetland habitats.

The success of Wicken’s naturally managed landscape is proven in its impressive evidence of 9,175 recorded species. It is home to species ranging from wetland-loving plants such as Fen Bedstraw (Galium uliginosum) and Hemp-agrimony (Eupatorium cannabinum), to birds of prey such as Hobbies and Hen Harriers, and from reptiles such as Common Lizards to a vast variety of insects including a huge range of butterflies, dragonflies, damselflies and beetles. It is impossible to do justice to the wealth of wildlife at Wicken with just a short summary, I would really recommend visiting the reserve to appreciate its diversity.

We humans may use energizing experiences of the elements as a way of bringing ourselves back in touch with nature and escaping the rat-race, but these species have never had the chance to lose contact with their natural state of being. For us, encounters with true wildness are awakening, but we can learn a lot about how to live from creatures for whom wildness is just a way of life.