Harolds Park Wildland is a new purchase by natural capital and rewilding company Nattergal. 

Perched on top of a prominent hillock and overlooking Epping Forest and the City of London to the south, Harold’s is an amazing site of historic relevance and natural history. 

Old maps show the landscape as a deer park for many years, before finally succumbing to agriculture around the 1850s (approximate). Its heavy clay soils were a complex landscape to plough & work before the agricultural revolution and subsequent mechanisation of farming. 

Today the land is a mix of arable fields, equestrian grass paddocks and open grassland.

Some wonderful jewels remain such as ancient Hornbeam coppice, wizened Oaks in the boundary hedges and remnants of the deer fence/palisade and ditch which used to enclose the land. 

Digg & Co were asked, much like our other involvements with Nattergal to historically research the landscape and ecological history before bringing to life a visualisation and masterplan of the future. We love these moments where the whole studio comes together to reveal what is possible and think carefully about how recolonisation, reintroduction and grazing guilds of herbivores will all influence the future ecosystem. 

The aim is that one day, from the windows of the Shard, you will see wheeling storks dropping in over white park cattle, ponies and pigs. Nightingales will sing from dense scrub and rare helleborines and orchids will re-emerge amongst the coppice and ancient woodland.

The existing equestrian facility perched at the very top of the landform will also perhaps rotate into artisan studios, a gateway for the land and other associated businesses closely tied to ecosystem restoration and revival. 

In all this location will provide a further natural anchorpoint in a landscape criss-crossed by infrastructure and development and support the efforts of Epping Forest. One of the country’s greatest natural assets.