When Was Britain Last Wild? with Eloise Kane

What does “wild” actually mean in a country where almost every landscape bears the mark of people?

George Browne and Richard Prideaux are joined by archaeologist and author Eloise Kane, whose book Wilderlands: The Human History of Wild Britain traces 12,000 years of our changing relationship with the natural world.

Starting with the extraordinary antler headdresses found at Star Carr, the conversation moves through ancient field boundaries, hunting, domestication, introduced species and deliberately designed landscapes to ask how much of what we think of as natural has actually been shaped by human hands.

There are brown hares that arrived thousands of years after people did, man-made landscapes that now feel completely wild, red kites moving from pest to conservation success story, and wolves that have become symbols of both what Britain has lost and what some people would like to bring back.

That leads into the modern arguments around rewilding, access, wild camping and our tendency to value nature most when it behaves in the way we would like it to. Do we really want wildness, or do we want the appearance of it without the inconvenience?

Rather than searching for some perfect point in the past to recreate, Eloise argues for using history to understand the landscape we actually have. The fact that somewhere bears our mark does not automatically make it less valuable.

Useful Links - Wilderlands: The Human History of Wild Britain - Eloise Kane on Bluesky - Star Carr Archaeology Project - SideCountry - Support SideCountry on Patreon

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