Mark Haworth-Booth writes: While I agree with the thrust of Silis McLeod’s article on ‘The Con of the Wild’, [s]he is wrong about Knepp. The rewilding estate is not in ‘rural Suffolk’ but in Sussex. The remark that Knepp ‘is a hybrid between Michael Crichton’s Isla Nublar and a very middle-class Butlins’ is not convincing. I certainly enjoyed a morning walk around Knepp, a year or two ago, seeing white storks and listening to nightingales. Knepp introduced regenerative farming on the estate in 2021 and deserves credit for that too.

Silis MacLeod replies: I would like to thank Mr Haworth-Booth for putting me right about Sussex. He is also correct that regenerative farming should be commended when and wherever it appears. But large-scale rewilding principles – such as those pursued at Knepp – perpetuate, if not tacitly reward, unsustainable and ultimately unjust models of land ownership. (This may be more apparent in Scotland than across the border.) That the ‘estate’ is gaining legitimacy in our modern times is a phenomenon about which we should be wary. After all, these estates were the sites of the socially disatrous agricultural ‘improvements’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.