CHAPTER ONE

Boar

In my early school days, July heralded the start of the holidays as my parents released me into the flower-filled glades of the Dordogne. Here, I could be safely relied upon to run, not in a straight line, but in excited circles, chasing a range of fairy-tale butterflies long lost in numbers to Britain. The bramble-filled edges of the shaded forests flickered with wood whites and white admirals. Heath fritillaries became commonplace distractions as they alighted on scabious. The ethereal black-veined white, a spectral ghost of the British countryside, was common – and sometimes, beating me for pace, a large tortoiseshell would lollop through, tauntingly alighting on a high oak leaf before bouncing away into the distance. Once or twice in a long day’s chasing, all hell would break loose as a purple emperor came sailing through, landing on a dung-pile at a clearing edge, or a majestic swallowtail sailed across the meadow, rarely deigning to stop for admiration.

The Dordogne’s woodlands were broken with meadows, each home to an abundance of butterflies I would never see back home. But the richest hunting grounds were often the most unlikely. Often, my long-suffering parents would bring the car to a halt beside a patch of wasteland, a roadside verge or an unpromising area of rubble as I glimpsed from the window the buttery shades of a Berger’s clouded yellow or the cobalt of a baton blue. These little rocky wastes, with loose soils and bursting clusters of wildflowers, often held areas of extremely high butterfly diversity. Over time, over successive holidays, this little mystery became more and more intriguing. Why did these disturbed areas often hold such a variety of species?

On opening the Collins Butterfly Guide, months later, magnifying glass poised over printed film exposure, I would ponder the illustrations by Richard Lewington to separate my fritillaries and brush up on my blues. Having worked out what I had photographed, my curiosity about that particular butterfly would draw me into the dense, terse text at the back of the book. Again and again, two words jumped out from the habitat descriptions: ‘disturbed ground’.

The following summer, the quest to discover new species became so extreme that I would be sometimes seen running into the earthy, rubbly edges of supermarket car parks in southern France, where, again and again, new butterfly species would unfailingly be found. Then, one day, we were walking through the more serene surroundings of the Dordogne forest meadows when we chanced upon an earthwork. Like the waste soils of the roadsides, it was bristling with butterflies. Birds-foot trefoil, gentian and cow parsley were all pushing up through the disrupted soil, each flower head flexing with fritillaries. The glistening soil was carpeted with wood whites, their long proboscises extracting nutrients from the rotavated earth. It seemed that we had come across ‘disturbed ground’. Once more, here were the butterflies. But who had made the earthwork?

Shortly after, with a sombre, alarming lack of warning, a hunter, or chasseur, appeared silently beside us, clutching a large and powerful rifle. He looked disconsolate, having had an unproductive day, and stopped for a chat. My father explained in French that we were chasing butterflies. The hunter looked bemused. He had sharp ears and sharp eyes. ‘Ecoutez, la tourtourelle’ (Listen, the turtle dove), he said, as we heard a faint purring from deep within the woods. Then, we pointed out the earthwork. His expression looked disappointed. ‘Oui, c’est le sanglier. Mais, c’est vieux.’ And with that, he departed into the forest as silently as he had come.

My first encounter with the Dordogne’s sangliers, or wild boar, came some days later – in the form of a casserole. Yet whilst their earthworks were to be seen everywhere, in various forms – fresh from the night before or long overgrown with flowers – the animals themselves were as ghosts. It grew to fascinate me that the giant hogs once hunted by Henry VIII and capable, I was told, of ‘killing knights’, could be watching us from all around. I was unsure about their ambush technique and took great care when approaching the woodland edge. Yet it would be 15 years before I finally set eyes on these mythical beasts – and not in the Dordogne, but far closer to home, in the Forest of Dean.

It was 1 July 2010. The woodland was dense, and the line of sight was broken. There was a ditch ahead, and there was something large within it. I couldn’t see until I was very close indeed that the creature was wiry and hairy. The ditch was also far deeper, and thus the animal far larger than I had thought. Then, the creature emerged and raised its head.

There is an instant, primal punch in coming face to face with a wild boar. The ancient, wizened, kind, curious face. The massiveness of the towering head. The mossy aspect, as if hewn from a fallen stump. Boar have a presence that projects beyond the physical. They are as ancient as the trees, and their appearance in a woodland I had known for years felt like a temporal passage to another realm. As I watched, the mother, who could smell me, but see me rather poorly, revealed, in her snuffling wake, a sounder of stripy humbug piglets.

At this point, I faced a difficult decision. I was in the course of making my first film, and so, instructing the family group to ‘wait there’, I dashed back through the woodland to my car. Shouldering my camera and brutally heavy tripod, I began to make my way back to the mother and her young. The soil was a chaotic mess as if a gardener had just put down his spade, but the boar were nowhere to be seen. The adrenaline compensating for the growing groove in my right shoulder, I, too, ploughed on, following the fresh diggings, one of nature’s most obvious mammalian tracks.

It took me almost an hour and a kilometre’s worth of walking before I caught up, once more, with the mother and her bouncy, wriggly, rubbery piglets. Then my heart skipped another beat. Staring at me from the shadow of an oak was a giant. A male boar weighs up to 100kg – and this one looked every gram of that. His two tusks, and the silvery hairs around them, gave him an austere expression, yet the placid eyes were calm. The boar stared at me with mild curiosity. I stepped back a few paces and slowly sat down. He watched but didn’t come any closer. By reducing my profile, it seemed that I appeased him. Males play only a passing role in parenthood but can still defend sows and their young. But soon, his stomach got the better of him, and the boar joined the mother and her humbugs rootling away in the soil.

I sat riveted for an hour as the family industriously turned over more soil than a human gardener might aspire to in a week. The Dean’s beloved bluebells bulbs were unceremoniously uprooted – and snorted down. Boar love bulbs and tubers, yet whilst their short-term effect on these lovely plants is to remove them, their longer-term effect is the opposite. Areas rootled by boar enjoy higher rates of bluebell germination, and in all their time in the Dean boar have, perhaps unsurprisingly, given their co-evolution beside bluebells, never wiped the bluebell out.

After soil-snuffling for quite some time, the enormous male sloped away into the forest. As he did, one of the humbug piglets made a run towards me, and the mother followed. I was by now rooted deep behind – and almost within – my tripod, tucked against the base of a tree. As I adjusted the lens, I realised the piglet was now too close for the camera to focus on. Soon, two, three, four, then all seven of the piglets discovered that the most appetising and fertile area to be rootled was now directly below my tripod. Before I could move, I was inundated with snuffling piglets. Then the sow came back to get them – and paused, just a couple of metres away. I could see every toothbrush bristle on her silvered head.

Like any good mother, she was happy as long as her children were in earshot, eyeshot, behaving and content. My being very still and very low, she even now didn’t see me as a threat. And once the piglets had been happily established within inches of my shoelaces, she, too, began rootling away, her giant snout a spade to their tiny trowels. Often, the humbugs would move in the mother’s wake. She disrupted: they ate. The largest of the litter had a large mound of clay soil stuck firmly to the top of his snout. No matter how much he tried to get it off, it wasn’t going anywhere. For the next two hours, the boar shared with me an insight into their industry, gentleness and family kinship that I will never forget. After exhausting the area around the tripod, they finally moved away – and at last, I was able to focus the camera and commit these remarkable creatures to film. Then, suddenly, a branch snapped in the nearby forest. Startled, the female grunted, and she and her humbugs pelted off into the woods. Within five seconds, I had lost them altogether – and this is how most people experience boar: most of the time, you hear a grunt and watch a curly tail vanish into the bracken – leaving only an earthwork in its wake.

Three years later, I was passing the same spot when a flash of purple caught my eye. Glowing in the dappled shade at the woodland edge, it was a vivid cluster of common dog violets. As I drew nearer, some orange petals grew airborne and fluttered around: a colony of small pearl-bordered fritillaries. They glided and bounced through the sunlight, alighting to nectar on the flowers – the same on which their caterpillars were raised. My mind was transported back three years to the snuffling piglets, and back again to the flower-filled earthworks of the Dordogne. It was another curious case of the boar and the butterflies.

There is nothing like a boar or close to a boar (or indeed, a pig). So successful and versatile has the design proven over time that speciation amongst wild pigs has been incredibly low. Indeed, with the exception of the bearded pigs native to islands such as Borneo, Java, Sumatra and the Philippines, the entirety of Eurasia is ruled by just one species – the wild boar, Sus scrofa. Compared to other European animal families such as cats (which have diverged into forms as diverse as the lynx, wildcat and leopard) or canids (in Eurasia, the grey wolf, golden jackal, dhole, raccoon dog and several species of foxes), the boar stands out as an ecological singularity.

Boar can be found in the middle of marshlands in Poland and Belarus and in the reed-beds of the marshes in Iraq. They are competent swimmers whose capabilities exceed most of our own: in 2013, one animal made it from mainland France to the island of Alderney, a journey of 11km. Observers in the Black Sea have videoed piglet shoals following in the wake of nautical sows, proceeding to cause mild but comedic havoc amongst beach-goers as they snuffle past deckchairs on their way inland. There is something strangely elegant about swimming boar; they glide through the water with surprising speed and barely a splash.

Boar are equally at home in baking, arid environments, such as the dry maquis of the Mediterranean islands or the ancient grassland steppes of Hungary’s Hortobágy. Yet few animals on Earth are also more resistant to the cold. In Amurland in Siberia, long after the red deer have migrated to the south, the powerful Amur tiger is left with only prey hardy enough to resist temperatures that can drop below -40°C. Boar may be slowed down by the snow, but they are not deterred by it. Far hardier than brown bears, they do not hibernate, and their powerful snouts can pierce deep snow-cover to dig up food in the depths of winter. Boar, therefore, would originally have formed and reshaped the land in almost all of Europe’s habitats, and not just its woodlands. From freezing slopes to warm marsh water, boar can invariably find a way to endure – and force passage.

Evolved in an ecosystem originally dominated by giant grazers and their predators, the boar’s role is different and unique: it is the bulldozing digger of the animal kingdom. Whilst wallowing bison can cause significant disruption to the soil, and ponds can form in their wake, no other animal turns over so much soil, with so much consistency – and finesse – as the boar. Each boar can rootle, on average, 40m² in the course of a week.

Boar are uniquely attuned to the soil – and to what lives within it. Grubbing mostly for rhizomes (subterranean plant stems), tubers, roots and bulbs, they overturn the surface layer of the soil – but unlike crude human diggers, they do not rupture deep into the earth, and thereby avoid damaging the vital fungal circuitry by which plants and trees communicate. As with beavers, what boar do is simple: they turn over soil to uncover their food. The results of what they do are myriad and complex.

By rotovating only the top layer of the soil but then moving on to fresh digging grounds, boar act as nature’s oldest rotational farmers. As they move, they ‘reset’ tracts of land back to complex mounds of earth. Unlike a plough, which wipes an entire field back to earth, the diggings of boar are nuanced, textured and three-dimensional. Indeed, any of Britain’s 27 million gardeners might recognise this fresh, earthen ‘mess’ as the basis of their own beloved flowerbeds.

Working within woodlands and clearings, boar rotovate and smash bracken-filled forest floors back into nuanced, ridged environments. Because boar have returned recently to some large British woodlands, it has now proven possible to observe the effects. In 2020, I returned to check a sparrowhawk eyrie in the Forest of Dean, one I had visited 10 years before, finding my way back to it using photos I had taken in the June of that year. The vista at that time had been uniform and dreary: an endless carpet of fern. Bracken is not devoid of life but is profoundly limiting for many species if growing in dense, unbroken carpets. Larger invertebrates such as butterflies or bees cannot stop off in these areas to feed, and a profusion of bracken can often indicate a profusion of the animal that has eaten all else: deer. But, 10 years later, this arid forest floor had been transformed into a woodland garden.

Foxgloves, which, like most wildflowers, flourish in disturbed soils, were bursting through the boar-rootled ground; large red-tailed bumblebees droned through the woodlands, and honeybees were raiding every flower. On closer inspection, a host of other annual plants – sweet woodruff and wood sage, anemones and primroses – were to be found on the upward-facing ridges of the boar diggings; exposed to the glances of the sun.

Over the years in the Forest of Dean, as boar have created more and more nuances in the soil and continually ‘reset’ areas of forest floor with their spade-like noses, floral diversity has continued to increase. In those areas rootled over several years, common spotted and green-winged orchids have emerged. Orchids take time to disperse and propagate within the soil, but once they do, species like the autumn lady’s tresses – whose spiralling helix of white blooms flowers by the very end of summer – can grow to profusions as thick as grass in the boar-tilled gardens of the Dean.

As any human gardener will notice, as soon as fresh soil has been turned over, a range of birds, specially evolved to exploit fresh soil, appear as if by magic. Most of us with gardens can still enjoy the appearance of a robin as soon as we’ve turned over fresh soil. Swooping onto fresh earth, robins can be conjured as if from thin air as they feast on newly flushed insects and worms. In Britain, most robins now follow spade-, hoe- and fork-wielding primates around. Yet in most of Europe, the shyer, woodland-dwelling robin follows a far more disruptive gardener. Sitting quietly in the Forest of Dean, too, I have often watched robins, generally followed by dunnocks, blackbirds and song thrushes, foraging in the wake of families of boar, the animal they followed long before we tilled our gardens – or indeed colonised the British Isles.

Studies carried out in the French Sologne show that the effects of rootling on woodland birds are not limited to feeding alone; more ground-nesting birds inhabit those areas where boar have disturbed the soil. The dappled buttercup-coloured wood warbler, vanishing from many of our woodlands, fares significantly better in boar-managed French woods, preferring to nest on the ground in light vegetation. In addition, by digging small rodents from their dens, boar can also decrease predation pressure on such ground-nesting birds, displacing the small mammals that eat the wood warbler’s eggs.

From the moment that boar turn drab uniformity into serrated chaos, new life moves in. Rich communities of ants often colonise these disrupted soils. These, in turn, can feed a range of predators. In the ancient woodlands of Białowieża, in eastern Poland, the wryneck – an anthill-raiding avian specialist sadly lost from our own shores – can often be found frequenting the anthills formed in the wake of rootling.

The frequent rainfall of our temperate island adds another layer of diversity to the wallows left by boar. Compared to our relict ancient woodlands, many of Britain’s forest environments are extremely dry. Away from areas like the New Forest, where large tracts of deciduous woodland remain wetted by unfettered streams and bogs, many of Britain’s plantations and woods are arid due to over-management and soil drainage. This means that amphibians, from great crested newts to our ever-declining common frogs and toads, must often travel enormous distances to find a suitable home across arid forest floors.

The wallowing of boar conspires with rainfall to change all of this. In areas of Britain being recolonised by boar, frogspawn can be found in the soggy heart of wallows; in other boar-ponds, all three species of newt. Boar wallows are shallow, creating, in turn, shallow ponds perfectly suited to amphibious needs. Boar have been known to eat frogs, as well, but it seems probable that when it comes to amphibians, the actions of far-roaming boar create more life than they destroy. Whilst boar systematically create habitat for amphibians, they are not known to systematically revisit every pond years later to eat those amphibians that have moved in. And whilst boar can, on occasion, consume reptiles such as smaller grass snakes and adders, they also create the perfect basking conditions for both species. Adders, in particular, will often warm up in areas of complex, disturbed soil, close to taller vegetation such as bracken, before heading off to hunt themselves.

Boar do not just leave unruly soils behind for others to do the work. They play a little-known but vital role in sowing the soil itself. Zoochory is a term that refers to the dispersal of diaspores: the seeds necessary to sow the next generation of plants. And wild boar, as they roam, aid endozoochory: the dispersal of plant seeds through ingestion. Similar to their woodland neighbour, the red deer, boar can vector thousands of individuals of dozens of plant species around a landscape. Being habitat generalists, like red deer, and not tied to dense woodland, boar can also bring a range of grassland and non-woodland flowers into forest edges and glades. But unlike red deer, boar prepare the ground for planting as they go! Thus, those plant seeds fertilised then excreted by wild boar are far more likely to land in perfectly tilled gardens, receptive to their growth, than those defecated by non-digging mammals such as deer. In one elegant circle, therefore, boar prepare the ground and plant the flowers. Uncannily, we have only relatively recently learned to do this in our evolution as a species.

This, of course, resolves the little mystery at the start of our chapter. The many wildflowers, and their associated butterflies, adapted to the ‘disturbed soils’ now often banished to just our wastelands or roadside verges or the scruffier edges of some farmland fields, would once have prospered far more widely across all of our landscapes in the wake of wild boar.

Over time, the diggings of boar develop ever more complexity as trees begin to thrive. Wild crab-apple, an insect-rich haven for native wildlife, is beloved by boar. In autumn, boar, scrumping apples from the ground, are one of few animals capable of carrying their propagules intact within the gut. Roaming over large distances, boar effectively plant orchards, albeit those far more scattered and haphazard than our own. In Europe, a range of other now endangered trees, such as the Iberian pear, are most effectively dispersed and planted – complete with a healthy dose of fertiliser dung – by wild boar. And since the historical demise of Europe’s elephants and giant elk, boar have become amongst the important transporters – and planters – of large-seeded wild fruit trees.

Where boar have dug in sunlit soils, in glades or grasslands, sunlight-fuelled scrubland begins to grow, as earthworks are rapidly populated with a rich variety of herbs and bushes. As wild herbs, brambles and young hawthorns take root, new creatures are brought into the woodland. In the twinkling edges of forest glades, clusters of honeysuckle and bramble, born from now-productive soil, become haunted by white admirals. This butterfly, whose caterpillars feast only on honeysuckle but which, in adult form, flickers between bramble flowers in woodland, has recolonised many boar diggings in the Forest of Dean, several years from their inception. A range of now rare and endangered British woodland butterflies, such as the wood white (which thrives around the older boar diggings of the Dordogne’s woodlands), feed on a range of vetches and trefoils, which grow best in disturbed soils.

One butterfly species in particular, the grizzled skipper, has been studied in relation to the presence of boar. In the Netherlands, it was shown that boar reduce the cover of nectar-poor grasses through their shallow rootling, increasing occupancy of the skipper’s host plants. And such miniature gardens, referred to by ecologists as ‘pioneer microhabitats’, are virtually impossible to recreate, at a landscape scale, by human hands.

Butterflies across Britain are in sharp decline as the microhabitats they once used vanish from our ever more sanitised countryside. In the absence of boar, conservationists have been left to replicate a complex world of jostling plants and met with limited success. Most butterflies of the British woodland edge, once tied to complex processes like dam-building beavers, wallowing cattle or rootling boar, continue to vanish. Yet the boar’s snout demonstrates remarkable finesse when it comes to conservation. By transforming huge areas of tall, species-poor tall grass to earth, boar sow food-plants as they go. By crashing through fern, they bring sunlight to the forest floor, which fuels the growth of wildflowers. And, in 2010, the story of the boar and the butterflies took a twist that nobody had predicted.

In the heart of Sussex, the famous Knepp Wildland project, whose story is recounted in Wilding, by Isabella Tree, had restored free-roaming cattle, horses and, in its southernmost reaches, free-roaming pigs to the land. Wild boar cannot presently be legally introduced into the wild in Britain, so the Knepp project used, instead, a wild boar proxy: the Tamworth pig. The Tamworths were released into the rewilding project’s southern block in 2009 – and left to snout it out. In the first years, their actions mimicked many of those described thus far for boar, as they rootled through Knepp’s fields: transforming silent similarity into a chaos of new plants and trees. Yet, just one year after their introduction into the rewilding project, the finesse of a pig’s snout would effect one of the most remarkable butterfly returns in British history.

Growing in the wake of rootling, but not in the un-dug soils in other areas of the estate, sallows had taken root. A form of hybrid willow, rarely tolerated in the farmed countryside or by many foresters, sallow is the sole food-plant of the purple emperor butterfly. This, in turn, lays its eggs on just a tiny proportion of individual sallows. For over a century, lepidopteran literature had turned the purple emperor into something of a legend, a canopy woodland butterfly, confined to the highest and oldest of our woods. Knepp’s rootling pigs were about to unfurl a snouty surprise.

In 2010, the first purple emperor butterfly appeared, flashing through pig-aided sallows on gaudy, kaleidoscopic wings. There were no known colonies nearby, and the emperors were not expected guests. Since this time, Knepp’s sallows have grown to host the largest colony of purple emperors in Britain, with more than 300 of these fierce, fruit-feasting giants on the wing each summer. In early July 2019, I walked around Knepp to a riot of butterflies I had never seen in my country; to a butterfly richness and abundance that recalled my childhood forays in the boar-rootled glades of the Dordogne. The arena had changed, but the emperors and admirals, the skippers, whites and blues of the varied scrubby grasslands were the same. And the architects – Tamworth pigs, Knepp’s stand-in boar substitutes – were the snout-wielding butterfly gardeners behind this success.

Just as beavers get better in a landscape the longer they are left to roam within it, the actions of boar – or free-roaming pigs – in digging the land extend not only across landscapes but also across time. As new scrublands grow in the wake of rootled soils, a three-dimensional world of wild apartments is created. In addition to the colonisation of Knepp by purple emperors, equally remarkable has been the sharp increase in turtle doves; a species now vanishing elsewhere in Britain and headed for imminent extinction. For decades, British conservation had pinned upon turtle doves the label of a farmland bird; one that required the disturbed, weed-rich margins of arable fields to survive. Like many species, turtle doves had been making do – or failing to make do – as herbicides slowly wiped from farmland soils the weeds and seeds that turtle doves required to survive. Yet at Knepp, as hawthorns, blackthorns and dog-rose pushed up through snouted soil, an entirely new outcome was created. Here, turtle doves are now nesting deep within a sanctuary of thorny scrub, but feeding in the disturbed ground colonised by plants such as chickweed, fumitory and knot-grass. The rich thorny scrub grows in the wake of land rootled years before. The plants grow in soils disturbed in the far more recent past. In such scrub-grassland habitats, the action of wild diggers are at once past and present. But in other areas of Knepp, where the Tamworth pigs were not introduced, the turtle dove has not prospected – its much-needed disturbed soil being absent.

Whilst a range of birds are adapted best to open grasslands, and others to dense walls of scrub, broken scrub-grasslands fuse these habitats into one and are amongst the most productive of all Britain’s habitats on land. These habitats have also vanished over more than a century, taking with them a range of species whose futures now hang on the brink. The grey partridge feeds in disturbed soils but scuttles rapidly into cover; rarely straying far from thorny shade. Its nest is placed deep within vegetated scrub, yet its livelihood depends on foraging insects from bumpy open grounds. The vivid and cheerful linnet, increasingly absent from our farmlands, places its nest deep within bramble, but feeds around pioneer grasses and flowers. The cirl bunting, currently confined to the cavernous hedgerows and stubble fields of Devon and Cornwall, is adapted to nest in dense thorn, but forages on broad-leaved weed seeds such as fat-hen. The more we look to our ‘farmland’ birds, the more it becomes clear that these were once boar birds, too. The implications for their conservation, therefore, are enormous.

Were the actions of Britain’s boar and their descendants to become more widespread in our grasslands, not only in our woodlands, then successes such as those being seen at Knepp might one day become considerably more commonplace in the regenerative farms of the future. And for this to happen, we have to remember that wild boar are, for some people, simply too wild. Although not dangerous to people, boar can disrupt productive farmed environments and cause financial damage on private land. Their widespread return to woodlands, wilder grasslands and even our wetlands could be welcome. But in other places, boar have a more widely accepted relative. Sadly, it too has now vanished from much of the countryside.

Nine thousand years ago – some time after we had domesticated wolves, cattle, horses and sheep – settlers in eastern Turkey had the wisdom and courage to domesticate wild boar. Boar were most probably domesticated for a one simple reason. Chasing them around woodlands with a spear was dangerous and tiring work. Having boar on tap, in the form of tame and well-fed pigs, led to fewer fatalities and better outcomes for all – except the pig in question. Boar remained wild, as wolves do to this day, but a new form of farmland boar had been born. This brought about, ecologically and agriculturally, a radical transformation.

For thousands of years, the pig would joyfully disrupt the soils of farmed grassland Europe – and until the Second World War, pigs were common across the mixed farms of our own countryside as well; rootling at will. Many of the onetime actions of boar would, in our farmland environments, have been replicated, in part at least, by the pig. Old breeds in particular, such as the Tamworth, the dappled Oxford Sandy and Black, or the prehistoric and grumpy-looking Berkshire, still travel and feed in a manner (when given the choice) that is strongly reminiscent of boar.

In recent decades, pigs have become amongst the worst-treated of Britain’s livestock; penned indoors to a life of misery that their good nature and intelligence does not merit. They have become, in huge areas of farmed Britain, almost forgotten as the farmyard animals that once roamed free. Yet a return to wilder piggeries is not only in the interests of a more sustainable farmed environment, and better food, but also in the interests of our wildlife.

In particular, pigs can be profoundly beneficial when it comes to restoring life to lifeless hillsides, compacted by decades, if not centuries, of grazing sheep. Whilst sheep-grazing results in soil compaction, and prevents regeneration, pigs militate against this by rootling the ground and maximising the chances of new flowers and trees taking root, smashing through bracken and creating open ground.

On the regenerative farms of the future, pigs may have another role to play. As farmers begin to move away from deep-ploughing, which rips apart the fragile fungal structures of the soil, and weakens it over time, they might think to harness the oldest plough of all. By leaving old-breed pigs in a field over a length of time, you can rather effectively plough a field, albeit with less uniformity than a machine. The more pigs run free in our farms, on our hills, and in our woods, the more rich and diverse our lands will become.

Transforming the soil, resetting the basis of life itself, the boar and its friends must rootle back into our lands, our culture and our acceptance. As a nation of gardeners, all of us the friends of robins and the tillers of soil, we can surely grow to admire, and make some room for, one of the oldest and most talented gardeners of all.