My wild weekend in Suffolk

How much wilderness can we handle? Not as much as we think? Many of us long to leave the beaten path and cast aside our accoutrements. Then we find ourselves chafing at the bugs and the poor mobile signal and asking if there is somewhere nearby to watch the Arsenal game.

This tension weighed on me, as I sat outside in Suffolk, a log fire smoking to one side, a clear night sky above. With two dozen other journalists, I was on a trip to try out a bonfire feast at the grandly named Wilderness Reserve.

Let’s be straight: the Wilderness Reserve is a wilderness in the way that Frank Ocean is an ocean. Bluntly, it isn’t one. It is part of a 8,000-acre estate, largely made up of sedate countryside. Accumulated by John Hunt, founder of British estate agents Foxtons, it excels in the tame aesthetic that many English people expect from their landscapes. Capability Brown designed it in the 18th century. Sheep and cows have kept much of the land down to a couple of inches of grass. Staff drive around in Morris Minors. Delusions of Downton Abbey pour from their exhaust pipes.

Wilderness — in the sense of space outside of human influence — is an impossibility in Britain, and perhaps every other country too. That hasn’t stopped it becoming fashionable branding. There’s the bucolic Wilderness Festival at Cornbury Park in Oxfordshire. There’s a digital marketing agency called Wilderness, based in the famously uncharted lands of Shoreditch. Restaurants manage to make almost any ingredient more alluring by placing the word “wild: in front of it. This taps our desire for the natural world without the inconveniences.

In Suffolk, the Wilderness Reserve has at least embraced nature restoration. It has planted more than 1m trees in the past 27 years (after thinning, a few hundred thousand remain). Identified bird species have risen from 38 to 150. This wildness barely impinges on a visitor’s experience. The estate’s front lodge is a luxury sweetshop. You can sweep in the gates in a jeep, and spend your entire visit without getting your shoes dirty. “It’s a Suffolk wilderness, not an African wilderness,” one of the architects explained. To the untrained eye, it’s a supersized garden.

When Hunt acquired the land, he found himself with more houses than he knew what to do with (Foxtons customers may wish to grit their teeth). The houses have now been restored, and are available for rent. The most popular, Hex Cottage, is at the wild end of the spectrum, with no electricity.

Others are luxurious, with built-in spas — designed not just to avoid the discomfort of cold water swimming, but also the ritual in a typical hotel when you enter the lift in a bathrobe. I was staying in The Farmhouse, a pink cottage with six bedrooms and an uncluttered wooden interior. The reserve offers a catering option. It was explained to me that this is handy, “especially if you don’t have a chef at home.” I nodded earnestly.

Aldo Leopold, the great American naturalist, would probably despair of all this. Leopold, who died in 1948, saw wilderness disappearing, but hoped that certain associated values could be preserved, represented by “the primitive arts of wilderness travel especially canoeing and packing.” To him, these activities were the basis for a sustainable relationship with the land.

In contrast, Leopold lamented that “Europeans do not camp, cook, or do their own work in the woods if they can avoid doing so.” That’s not entirely fair — the pandemic has helped a camping revival — but we do have what the nature writer Benedict Macdonald has called “ecological tidiness disorder”. “What people have forgotten is that there are meant to be a thousand pairs of swallows in a village, not one,” says Macdonald.

Being left in the woods seemed poor service. But it was the closest to wilderness the experience had come

He is head of nature restoration at the newly launched Real Wild Estates Company, which is aiming to restore 100,000 acres of Britain within 15 years, an area twice the size of Balmoral. It plans to recoup its investments through eco-tourism as well as selling companies carbon offsets. The target market spans those who are happy to embrace camping, and those who want something less exerting. The vision for the land includes more large wild animals, including ospreys and golden eagles. (For Leopold, wilderness was synonymous with predators such as wolves. Macdonald makes clear no wolves are planned; indeed British landowners barely tolerate beavers).

At Hunt’s Wilderness Reserve, the main animal attractions are still edible. We were guinea-pigs at a Bonfire Fire Feast — a lavish quarterly event in the forest, hosted by a chef whose restaurant holds a Michelin star. Before the feast, we learnt to throw axes at a wooden target. It made me feel vaguely Viking. The meal itself, cooked by Tom Kerridge, involved huge plates of pork belly, chicken, beef, lobsters and something branded called “wilderness lamb”.

After the feast, I waited to be shepherded home. But the guides had vanished into the night, along with many guests. Only a few stragglers were left. The Swedish candles — burning logs that had lit our way — had now extinguished. The absence of light pollution no longer seemed an advantage.

We set off in the vague direction of The Farmhouse. It was November. We became lost and cold. We didn’t feel at risk of death or relaxation. We avoided a ha-ha, pried open an electric gate, and stumbled home.

I was torn. Being left in the woods seemed poor service. But it was the closest to wilderness that the experience had come. I decided I could probably just about handle it.

The next morning, our hosts offered all visitors a swim in a lake, the temperature of the water in single digits. Two dozen of us slithered in. Maybe we’re ready for the wild — as long as a jeep is waiting to take us back to home comforts.