DHBlog002 · An article by Robert Sharp
The Chettle Estate has been part of Cranborne Chase for many centuries. Centred on the village of Chettle and including Chettle House [until 2015], the estate’s lands lie just outside the in-bounds of the chase, and were therefore freer to farm than their neighbours at Farnham, for example. But even so, farming anywhere on the Chase was a challenge until Disenfranchisement in 1829, when the Earl of Salisbury gave up his rights. Immediately there was a surge in agriculture that saw land all over the Chase being ploughed up.
The current owner of the Chettle Estate is Alice Favre, a descendant of the Castleman family, bankers and solicitors from Blandford who built the first railway into Dorset. The Castleman family invested in the house and rebuilt the church almost completely from ruins. In 1946, the estate passed to the Bourke family and came largely under the control of a lineage of women. As Alice reflects: “My grandmother was passed [the estate] by her uncle, who had no heirs to pass it to. That must have been fairly unusual in the 1940s, a non-titled woman owning a whole village!” But the inheritance was not really a windfall: “When my grandmother took over it was just at the end of WWII and the estate had a debt of around £35,000 (equivalent to around £1.5m nowadays) and many houses were in need of a lot of attention. To pay off the debt she sold everything she could, which was mainly trees and livestock as furniture and paintings were worth very little after the war, whilst loaning money off various wealthier members of the family. My grandmother was a formidable woman and took to restoring the cottages herself just to keep from going under, she put indoor bathrooms into most of the houses herself, houses didn’t have plumbing before then, except to the kitchen tap. Back in those days owning houses was a millstone around your neck, rent was paultry and houses were constantly in need of repair. If you ask anyone who knew her they will say she was one of the hardest working women they knew. She was also a single mother with 3 children.”
Alice’s mother was left the Estate in 1967, whilst away in America she left the Estate in the care of her brother but returned home to take over the Estate in the early 1980’s just after Alice was born. Neither Alice’s grandmother nor mother had any agricultural background and so left the farms to be run by local farmers. Until recently the 860 acres on the estate were divided across two farms, 550 acres for one tenant and 280 for the other - one of the tenancies has been in the same family since her grandmother leased it to them in the 1940’s.
Alice was not content to carry on this arm’s length relationship. “Since I took over in late 2017, after my mother died, I have learnt a lot about farming (a combination of many farm tours, going to four Oxford Real Farming Conferences and a lot of reading) so I have been getting more involved in the land and agricultural side of the estate. It amazes me what we have done to farm land worldwide, all the chemicals we have put into our soil, water and air - being led by the agronomists (the drug dealers of the farming world) rather than by our own knowledge of the land and nature.
“I have just kept back 60 acres for a project that the community are going to run - whereby we will link up the village shop with this land. It’s crazy that we have a busy village shop yet none of the produce sold there is grown on my land, or actually any land nearby! We do have Chettle strawberries in the summer but that is it. We haven’t started farming those 60 acres yet but we have had 5 cows doing a tour of the fields. The fields were part of a fairly intensive dairy farm before so they needed a rest and a light graze.”
So what about the other 800 acres? “I wrote a vision for the land back in 2020 and I gathered a board of 18 advisors who spent a day round a map with me, led by an expert permaculture facilitator. I will be implementing this plan over the next 10+ years but it’s a vision that I hope can be followed for the next 40 years. I have also kept the people who live and work here abreast of the developing vision for the Estate. We have held 2 community days where I have given speeches about my journey. Everyone was very close to my mother so it’s had to be an ongoing transition, people can find change hard. And I always ask for their input and feedback along the way. I think everyone should feel involved and listened to when it comes to where they live.”
“We see some of the land being returned to nature restoration, with conservation grazing and light tree planting - rather than rewilding. I won’t be putting up a big deer fence and we will be controlling when and where the animals go on the land. Also this is only on around 350-400 acres of the estate. So maybe 50% will go to nature restoration and the remaining 50% will be used for growing food. Rewilding polarises people and that is what we don’t need right now. We need a little of everything and a lot of what works for your specific type of land. Rewilding can spark the same response as the word ‘vegan’, it gets people's backs up. The reality is, we need to eat much less meat, and we need to farm a lot less intensively and with nature, not against it. If you have a problem with a weed or a pest you need to work out what to add to the mix (ie what is missing) to fix the problem, rather than destroying something to try and fix it. The exception to this rule is where apex predators can’t be reintroduced to control pests. I would advise everyone to watch the film 'The Biggest Little Farm', this is a perfect example of how to continually add nature to problems to fix them and it’s a beautifully shot film about a piece of desert like land becoming a flourishing farm full of food and nature.”
All this sounds somewhat familiar, a bit like the Chase of old when it was managed more for the benefit of the deer and farming had to fit around that. “Back then there were more people on the land and that is definitely something I want to address as well. My two tenant farmers don’t really have any full-time employees, because with arable or livestock farming and the plethora of equipment that is out there, you barely need any actual people. But this isn’t right. With the farm that will be attached to the shop, we estimate that those 60 acres will employ around 8 full-time people.”
Back then, however, the Chase was essentially a hunting ground. “Hunting is an interesting one too. It’s a sport for the rich, whilst the poor country folk are allowed to do a ‘beaters day’ at the end of the season. Thousands of birds are put down on land that can’t support them and they are fed by gamekeepers for several months before they are shot by rich people wanting big bird days. That’s not sport, or good for the countryside. British hunting should take a leaf out of the Scandinavians books; they go out to stalk wild animals and sometimes come home with nothing. We still need to shoot things in the countryside unfortunately – we have a lack of predators (wolves, bears, pine martens) to kill the squirrels, pigeon and deer. These are 3 pests that cause a lot of havoc to farmland and woodland. I haven’t quite got my head round the plan for reducing their numbers. The squirrel and deer damage in my woods is something else!!”
Alice's plans are extremely encouraging, but they might take a while to come to fruition. Restoring chalk grassland, for example, sounds like a long-term project. “Funnily enough this is the one part of my vision that I am debating on the methods. I get mixed feedback on this part of the plan. Some say it will be easy, others say it will be very hard. I can’t answer this very fully at the moment as it is a part of my vision that I want to revisit with more opinions from those who have done it, tried it or tried a hybrid of it.”
Other then time, what does she think will be the biggest stumbling blocks? “Financing it! Money is an issue for many landowners and farmers that want to do what is best for nature. The government hasn’t given us any clear guidance on what the schemes will be, how much they will pay or whether they will back pay you for things that you do now, before the schemes are officially launched, so many farmers and landowners are holding back on making the right changes, which is a shame. I have a belief that what I am doing is right and that I will succeed one way or another.”
A last word, on plants perhaps? “I am no botanist, dendrologist or horticulturalist but I planted 3 giant redwoods last year and I would love to see them in 100 years time. They are in a triangle on a high point on the estate. I also want to see a landscape that has a balance of nature and food for human consumption. This is key to humans survival on this planet.”
Chettle village is just off the A345 Blandford to Salisbury road connected via a quiet lane with almost no through traffic. Why not stop and take a look in the shop and wander around the village. Back in May 2018 I did just that and counted 93 species in the village centre. The churchyard is a good place to start with Pimpinella saxifraga (Burnet saxifrage), Asplenium trichomanes (Maidenhair Spleenwort) and Chelidonium majus (Greater Celandine), for example. A small pond adds to the variety and at the time there was a unkempt area opposite the church where Fragaria vesca (Wild Strawberry), Silene latifolia (White Campion), Viola arvensis (Field Pansy), Dipsacus fullonum (Wild Teasel), and Ballota nigra (Black Horehound) were all growing. So often I have found a small patch of ground near a village centre providing a tiny haven for plants.
All images are by Alice Favre except where stated.