The Wildlife Trusts buy Rothbury Estate in landmark purchase

The Percy family pile – Alnwick Castle – still dominates the skyline of this handsome stone-built market town in Northumberland. Built by the Normans, it’s home to the Duke of Northumberland and has been for the past 700 years. It’s also known to millions as the setting for several Harry Potter films and more than 40 other TV and film productions.

Now though, a relatively small part of the vast lands owned by the family, is up for sale. At 9,500 acres, the Rothbury Estate is the biggest single parcel of land to be flogged off in England in the past 30 years.

And around this largest land sale, a lot of ‘30s’ are gathering. As already said, it’s the biggest English land sale for 30 years, with an asking price of £30 million. And perhaps a critical pathway to the government achieving setting aside 30% of land for nature by 2030.

Now that is some deadline to achieve. So step up The Wildlife Trusts. You may feel 30 million quid to be raised by a relatively small charity is a mountain to climb. In this context, 30 mountains. Well, the Trusts have already raised several million and have bought an appreciable part of the estate already.

It is magnificent countryside. The River Coquet, with its trout and salmon, flows through it. There are forests, there are peat bogs. There are heather clad fells, on which grouse shooting will end – which few seem to regret.

And there are farms, and that’s where one or two questions have arisen. Local farmer and agricultural auctioneer Chris Armstrong, whose holding is close to the estate, says he doesn’t want the Trusts to be the new landlord, but accepts it is inevitable.

He fears way fewer sheep as a sheep farmer. He fears way fewer farmers. He fears a massive, coercive rewilding project about to unfold and says this raises questions of food security.

Those fears are also echoed by a county councillor, Steven Bridgett, who is also convinced that what we are about to see across this swathe of Northumbria is some kind of rewilding whether the farming community wants it or not.

Well, we’ve been digging into this and talked not just to these worried men, but also to other farmers who take a different view. Neighbouring this estate is John Cresswell who farms 2,500 acres and is a total enthusiast for the Trusts’ venture.

He says the previous government’s ELMS, which stands for environmental land management scheme, has been a huge success for him. Indeed, as we film him, he’s putting in a new hedge of blackthorn, hazel, rowan and hawthorn, all paid for by this scheme. Across the road, a large paddock will be put to clover for four years, again, part of this scheme.

It’s one of the biggest benefits of Brexit, which allows farmers to be paid, not just for producing food, but for – as the name says – environmental land management, basically being paid for managing land for nature as well as for our food.

So how does that connect to this massive land sale? John insists exactly the benefits he has been enjoying on his holding will go to his neighbours on the Rothbury Estate.

No farmer will speak openly on the estate of course, in the middle of a land sale, that would be foolish. But the Trusts maintain that several have been in touch to say how enthusiastic they are about the scheme. They say they are already practising what’s known as regenerative farming.

This isn’t rewilding in any sense, but is a big step towards managing our landscape for nature as well as for food. So what’s the truth of the matter behind all the fears of those who say it will be rewilding , not regenerative farming

To get to that, Craig Bennett, CEO of the Trust, made the journey to the Simonside Hills here, bathed in sunshine, albeit with a biting northerly wind.

He totally refutes the charge that anything will happen coercively. It’s absolutely not about mass rewilding, he adds. He says there will be fewer sheep, probably far fewer. There will be more trees, but there’ll be indigenous species, juniper, aspen, birch and so forth. A very different prospect from the Forestry commission Sitka Spruce monoculture in this region.

He paints a picture in 10, 20 years, where you would have just as many farms producing, he says, possibly more food for local restaurants and cafes. But instead of the mono-species sheep culture, you would have a greater variety of sheep breeds, albeit far fewer in number alongside a much bigger variety of hardy upland cattle, pigs and so forth.

Overall, he would like to see more farmers, more jobs, more people coming to the valley, as visitors and as people living there. And if this vision can become reality, he says it would be a blueprint for many further such ventures.

I asked, how do you find 30 million quid? He’s curiously relaxed. We know they’ve already found several million and he says the ecology of fundraising is telling. It demonstrates, he says,  how public opinion is changing in an altering agricultural ecology as well as animal ecology.

He says many, many people want to donate small sums – £30, £50 – but there are also many major donors out there, clearly willing to donate several million pounds. And it’s an extraordinary opportunity, he says, a wild, beautiful landscape, much of which is already in fairly good condition in terms of biodiversity and variety, yet close enough to urban centres.

Indeed you can see part of this estate from St James’s Park, the football stadium which dominates the city centre of Newcastle upon Tyne to the south. It is in easy reach of the A1 and Alnmouth on the LNER mainline, is not far away.

But what about the Percy family? The vendors? They have had this land for seven centuries.

They are clearly enthusiasts of what the Trusts propose. We know this because they have in essence agreed to the sale of the entire estate already; actually exchanged on a fair slice of its moorlands and marginal land – and given the Trusts a generous two years to come up with the rest.