by Bankers don’t usually care much for nature conservation, but Charles Rothschild was different.
Born in 1877 into one of the world’s greatest banking families, he grew up to work in the family business, but nature was his true passion. Charles spent his free time classifying fleas, dragonflies and rare plants, and met his wife, the Hungarian baroness Rózsika Edle von Wertheimstein, on a butterfly collecting trip in the Carpathian mountains.
A pioneer in modern nature conservation, Rothschild recognized that protecting the habitat was a better strategy than trying to protect individual species. Over a century ago, he saw the impact of human activity on our natural habitats and felt compelled to create a list of 284 sites in Britain “worth preserving”.
Rothschild founded the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves (SPNR), which went on to become The Wildlife Trust, which today looks after over 2,300 nature reserves in the UK (more than McDonald’s).
Craig Bennett, chief executive of The Wildlife Trusts, tells me that “60 per cent of the UK population lives within three miles of a Wildlife Trust reserve… the concept of nature reserves is now well established, but this idea was groundbreaking in his part. [Rothschild’s] day.”
Focus on the Ferns
It all started in the Fens in the east of England, the low and fertile lands between Lincoln in the north, Cambridge in the south and Peterborough in the west, where the soil is rich heath and almost black. A walk in Woodwalton Fen and Holme Fen National Nature Reserves (NNRs) is the closest you will come to seeing the natural landscape that Rothschild saw more than a century ago, but remarkably, less than one per cent of the undrained uncultivated slope still exists. today – and this was only saved because Rothschild came in to buy the land in 1911.
On a cold autumn evening, one hundred years since Rothschild’s death in 1923, Woodwalton Fen felt comfortably damp, the sky darkening above. Great Fern monitoring and research officer Henry Stanier walked with me, identifying bird calls and talking a little about the long history of the area.
“The wild finland is almost gone. Local people would hunt wild fowl and dig turf using ‘bog boats’, flat-bottomed ponies like the ones you see in Cambridge, to navigate the man-made boats and ditches,” said he.
Henry showed me around Rothschild’s stilted bungalow, the banker’s retreat in the fens, and shared Cambridgeshire Wildlife Trust’s vision for this fen as part of a large new wetland landscape called the Great Fen.
The 50-year project to connect the fragments of Woodwalton Fen and Holme Fen will create a mosaic of habitats, a “living landscape” and will work on nearby farmland to create a wetlands corridor and trials have already begun wet farming (paludiculture). From the north-east edge of Woodwalton Fen you can see the stubble of the fields after the harvest, but already bright blackbirds are probing the wet ditches, and herons are scurrying across the open landscape. Beyond the farm, I could make out the thick treeline of Holme Fen, the largest lowland birch woodland in England, managed by Natural England.
Britain’s first nature reserve
At first Rothschild intended to give the fen land he bought in 1911 to the National Trust, but they refused. Undoubtedly, he founded the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves (SPNR), which bought Woodwalton Fen in 1919 and created the country’s first nature reserve. But it wasn’t just the Fens that Rothschild fought to protect, he wanted to extend protection to natural habitats across the country.
In the book Wildlife in Trust – A Centenary of Nature Conservation, writes Tim Sands: “His idea was to use the Society to convince others of the desirability of permanently preserving sites suitable for nature reserves. The plan was to ‘do a national survey of such sites with the help of local associations and individuals’.”
The SPNR visited a number of sites and sent questionnaires to others – once completed, they were individually filed in Rothschild’s separate blue banking envelopes. Eventually, Rothschild had his list of 284 sites and submitted them to the government. Today, some of these sites have been lost to time or destroyed by development, but many others are now owned and managed by a range of organizations including The Wildlife Trusts, the National Trust, RSPB, agencies on such as Natural England or Scottish Natural Heritage, or local groups.
Success stories include Blean Woods in Kent, one of the largest areas of ancient woodland in England; Braunton Burrows in Devon, the largest dune system in England, now part of a Unesco Biosphere Reserve; the Scottish islands including Foula, St Kilda and Ailsa Craig, all protected for their birds; and remote sites in Wales, such as Holyhead Mountain in Anglesey, with its rare plants.
It goes without saying that Charles Rothschild was quite young when he sought to save the natural habitats of Great Britain despite the black-and-white photographs of a stern man in a Victorian morning suit. In 1912, when he had his first meeting at the National History Museum to discuss the idea of forming an association, he was 35 years old. However, despite his boundless energy, Rothschild was described by his daughter as “a lonely and isolated figure” and after contracting encephalitis, he died by suicide in 1923.
His foresight in recognizing the need for rare habitats to be protected by law led to the creation of the National Parks and Countryside Access Act in 1949, which ultimately saved many of Britain’s most important spaces for wildlife and for recreation from destruction.
For more information about the Rothschild List and the Enach Mór Living Landscape see wildtrusts.org. Rachel Mills stayed south of the Fens near Houghton at Eagle Mill (doubles from £105).
