The Depths of the Wild
Sophie Yeo · The Times Literary Supplement
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Summary
Sophie Yeo praises Eloise Kane’s Wilderlands as a clear-eyed history of Britain’s long “dewilding” and a corrective to nostalgic ideas of an untouched natural past. Drawing on palaeoecology, recent scientific debates, and Kane’s fieldwork, the book traces how hunting, settlement, agriculture, and later development transformed the landscape from the post-Ice Age wildwood onward. Yeo especially values Kane’s caution in interpreting fragmentary evidence—from buried eagles to Seahenge—because modern ideas of wildness can distort what prehistoric people and places meant. That restraint gives the book contemporary force: archaeology, Yeo argues, must inform rewilding so future landscapes are not designed around nostalgia, guilt, marketable romance, or aesthetic preference alone.
Highlights
- Wilderlands begins when Britain’s landscape was still relatively wild. Relatively, because Eloise Kane begins about 12,000 years ago, when the glaciers of the last Ice Age were succeeded by the wildwood that is now the stuff of fairy tales. most of the megafauna that had shaped earlier ecosystems having become extinct, quite possibly through hunting.
- The wildwood didn’t last long. About 6,000 years ago, Britons realized that they didn’t need to rely on wild food for sustenance: they could raise crops and manage herds instead. From thereon, the landscape changed radically. Kane Kane outlines the dewilding that began in the Neolithic period and continued, with a temporary reprieve around the early Middle Ages, into modern times.
- Combined with accounts of her own fieldwork – including a foray into the depths of Silbury Hill – this gives the feeling of being accompanied by a capable guide.
- What to make, for instance, of the eagles interred alongside humans, 1,000 years after the original burial? Were they nesting in the cliffs or placed there intentionally? When faced with such mysteries, there is an “inherent danger … that our current view of the wild is what leads us to believe that these birds had a special place in later prehistory”. What these eagles actually meant, we will probably never know. Similarly mysterious is Seahenge, a Bronze Age monument made of tree trunks that Kane suggests may have represented the woodlands that were rapidly disappearing due to agriculture and climatic shifts – an early example, she posits, of ecological grief. Kane weaves a credible portrait of our ancestors from such fragments, and breathes life into our ancestors in a way that feels rare and authentic.
- Archaeology has too often taken a backseat in the discussion of how we should design the wild landscapes of the future, but to make sure they are places not built on “nostalgia, guilt and ideas of what is beautiful”, deepening our understanding of the living world of the past is essential.
Notes
The central question, as I understand it, is this: if human beings have been shaping Britain’s landscape for thousands of years, what exactly do we mean when we say that we want to make it wild again? The word “again” appears to promise a recoverable beginning—a landscape before us—but the article makes that beginning difficult to locate. The wildwood emerged after the last Ice Age in a world from which much of the megafauna had already vanished, possibly in part through human hunting. Agriculture later transformed the woodland; settlement, grazing and development transformed it further. There is no single untouched Britain waiting behind history. There appears to be a hierarchy of possible landscapes to which rewilding might appeal: the imagined primeval wildwood; the prehistoric landscape reconstructed from pollen, bones and buried objects; the mixed woodland and pasture remembered through later history; the landscape preferred by contemporary ecological science; and, finally, the landscape that present-day people find beautiful. These models are not identical, and none of them is entirely neutral. Each can be presented as the authentic past, even though each is selected from a long sequence of change. The question, therefore, is not simply how to restore nature, but which nature we believe deserves to be restored—and why. This does not mean that restoration is arbitrary, or that history offers no guidance. It means that we have a greater responsibility to name our purposes clearly. Are we seeking biodiversity; ecological resilience; the return of missing species; a reduction in human control; the preservation of cultural memory; or a landscape that gives people a feeling of beauty and freedom? These purposes can support one another, but they can also conflict. A landscape chosen because it looks ancient or romantic may not be the landscape in which the greatest variety of life can thrive. A landscape designed to relieve human guilt may still place human emotion at its center. Even something called wild can become a carefully managed picture of what we wish wildness to be. For me, archaeology matters here because it disciplines the imagination. It gives us evidence of earlier worlds while refusing to give us complete possession of their meaning. The eagles buried alongside human remains may have held a special place, but their significance cannot simply be read through our present understanding of wild animals. Seahenge may have represented disappearing woodland and something like ecological grief, but that interpretation remains a possibility rather than a recovered certainty. There is an honesty in admitting that we will probably never know exactly what these things meant. Such restraint protects the past from being made into a servant of the present. At the same time, uncertainty cannot become an excuse for doing nothing. The living world has been diminished, and waiting for perfect knowledge would allow that diminishment to continue. The task is therefore to unite humility with action: to act on the best evidence available while remaining willing to revise our plans; to recognize historical losses without pretending that one moment in history supplies a complete blueprint; and to judge restoration by the flourishing it makes possible, not merely by its resemblance to an attractive image of the past. Archaeology may not tell us exactly what to build, but it can prevent us from mistaking preference for truth. There also appears to be a hierarchy among those who are permitted to decide: governments and landowners, who possess legal power; scientists and archaeologists, who interpret evidence; local communities, who live within the landscape; and, finally, future people and the nonhuman lives that cannot enter the debate but will bear its consequences. A responsible idea of rewilding would need to account for all of these claims. It should not treat expert knowledge as an oracle, nor should it permit money, nostalgia or aesthetic preference to masquerade as nature itself. The least audible lives may, in fact, have the greatest stake in the decision. The phrase “designing wild landscapes” contains its own paradox. To design is to impose intention, while wildness suggests a loosening of intention. Rewilding may therefore require us to use human power in order to create the conditions under which human power can withdraw. We may choose boundaries, restore habitats, return species, change laws and remove pressures, but then we must allow living processes to develop in ways we cannot entirely direct. The deeper question is whether we can love the living world well without demanding that it always reflect us. Can we care for something without possessing its meaning or controlling its final form? I do not think the main question is simply, “What did Britain look like before agriculture?” There may be no single answer to that question. The more important question is how the layered and uncertain past can help us create a future that is not governed by fantasy. Wildness may be less a destination than a relationship: knowledge without pretended omniscience; care without possession; and design that knows when to yield. The point may not be to recover a lost wilderness, but to become better ancestors by accepting responsibility for the conditions in which life can exceed our plans. A truly wild future may be one whose beauty is not designed only for the human eye, and whose deepest meaning remains partly beyond us.
"The wildwood didn’t last long. About 6,000 years ago, Britons realized that they didn’t need to rely on wild food for sustenance: they could raise crops and manage herds instead." The line reads as if they're referring to raising human crops and managing human herds instead of the more natural way.
Source
- Author
- Sophie Yeo
- Publication
- The Times Literary Supplement
- Date
- August 7, 2026
- Reviewed work
- Wilderlands by Eloise Kane