Name: Wild Athelney

Size: 73 acres

Date rewilding began: Sep 2022

This is our most exciting rewilding acquisition to date. At 73 acres it is our largest wild stepping stone so far, and also our most historically interesting. It was here, in what where once the impenetrable marshes surrounding the Isle of Athelney, that Alfred the Great, King of the West Saxons, hid from the Vikings during their wars of the 9th century. The swamps and reeds of the Somerset Levels provided Alfred with sanctuary and a place to regroup, before he went on to defeat the Viking leader Guthrum and lay the foundations for the first unified Kingdom of England.

We think that the idea of rewilding what is effectively the ‘birthplace of England’ is an interesting symbol of the kind of future we can build together, and of how we can bring back life and wildness to all of our lives. We can’t take the land back to Alfred’s time, but we can allow it to develop as a wild space into the future, and a wonderful haven for nature.

We are very excited about the prospects for this land, but we need your help. We will need to raise about £500,000 in the next few years to pay back the cost of the land, and to 'manage' the project, so any help you can give would be hugely appreciated (rewilding doesn't too much active management as such, but there are still costs).

We would like to thank We Have the POWER for their generous support in the initial purchase of this land - but we need to pay them back to make sure we can do this again. We Have the Power’s Funding Nature programme provides finance to purchase land for nature, allowing charities like Somerset Wildlands to be able to secure sites that they would otherwise have little chance of raising the funds for. This is particularly important in our area where most plots of land are sold at auction with very short notice, meaning there is little time to raise money to buy land before it is sold.