THERE’S a snuffling and a scuffling, a snort and a shove coming from the other side of a pig pen in a farmyard on the Doddington Hall estate, near Lincoln. Three Hungarian Mangalitza pigs, genetic cousins of the now extinct Lincolnshire Curly Coat with hair that looks rather like wool, have just spent their first night at Doddington. “Do they have names?” I ask Isobel Wright, manager of Doddington Hall’s rewilding project, Wilder Doddington. She suggests that it would be best not to get too attached. The unnamed pigs are destined for a life of turning the soil and digging for worms. It’s all part of the rewilding programme that was started by Doddington’s owners, James and Claire Birch, in 2021.
Claire Birch, who spent her twenties “wearing a ‘Save the Rainforest’ T-shirt”, has “always been passionate about what wasn’t then called rewilding but was simply about caring for the nature around you”. When Claire took over Doddington in 2006, and shortly after opened a farm shop, the farm was contracted out in stewardship schemes. “I had no
