Guided by an ethos of ‘slow to change and careful of consequence’, an ancient Welsh farming estate is re-imagining itself as a species-rich landscape. Old-Lands takes you on a treasure trail of our native wonders –beautiful moths, wildflowers and insects...It’s late summer, early morning and the rear lawn at Old- Lands is shot through with dewy spider webs suspended between the sweet vernal and fine-leaved bentgrass. We pick our way over the lawn towards the trees, careful not to tread on them.

‘This is my younger brother’s silver lime,’ explains Sam Bosanquet, who is leading a nature walk of the grounds. ‘And this is my sister’s tulip tree. The trees are the same age as us and, even though I’m the eldest sibling, both are already taller than mine – the hornbeam. It’s quite fitting that, as an ecologist, the tree my parents planted for me is a native.’

As the eldest of three siblings, Sam, 42, inherited his family’s estate in rural Monmouthshire in 2015, moving with his young family from a small cottage in Carmarthenshire to a Grade II-listed manor that dates back to the early 16th century. Sam is the ninth Samuel Bosanquet: the first was the son of a French Huguenot who made his fortune trading with Aleppo; he bought the estate in 1801. His son – Sam’s great-great-great-great, great-grandfather – became the governor of the Bank of England.

Overnight, Sam has trapped 25 species of moth. They have been chilling in the fridge since 6.30am, which explains why they remain so still. He takes the lid off a tube and passes the first moth to my daughter, who watches it slowly creep along her finger.
The names – bestowed upon the species by the Victorians – read like a mellifluous paint chart: Pale Eggar, Dusky Thorn, Rosie Rustic, Burnished Brass. Sam explains each of their characteristics to his enraptured audience (including two two-year-olds) before they are released into the garden.

With sweep nets in hand, we set off across the lawns and Sam begins to explain his vision for Old-Lands. Together with the Gwent Wildlife Trust, who are based in the old stable block on the estate, their aim is to encourage diverse grasses and wildflowers back into the wider landscape here. Their method for doing so is far from efficient: ‘slow to change and careful of consequences’ is the deep-rooted ethos at Old - Lands. Areas of the lawn (the only areas that weren’t intensively farmed in the Fifties and Sixties) are fenced off and left to grow for six weeks.

Once those areas have set seed, the grass is cut as green hay and spread out into the fields in the hope that the seeds will take and the grasses and flowers native to Old-Lands will expand into the landscape, along with the population of native insects and wildlife. ‘It would be much quicker to plough up a field and plant it with wildflower seed,’ Sam concedes, ‘but they may not be the kind of flowers that succeed here. What we’re doing is a slow process: we may not see the results until we’re old.’We walk towards one of two cobble-lined dew ponds that appear on the 1790 map of the estate. ‘At that time, the road from Monmouth to Abergavenny used to run along the top of the garden here,’ Sam explains. ‘These ponds were the motorway service stations of the 18th century: they provided water for carriage horses and livestock and, on hot dry days, when wooden cartwheels started to crack, the carts would be reversed into the ponds to stop the wheels splitting.’ Today, the pond is home to toads, frogs, slow worms and all three species of British newt.

Under a nearby English oak, Sam picks off a small branch, drawing our attention to the knobbly, brown growths that hang amongst the acorns. These are the product of Knopper gall wasps which have laid their eggs in spring inside unformed acorns. This forces the tree to release more sugar into the acorn, creating a sticky, lumpen shell around the wasp larvae. When the adult hatches, it flies 200 metres across the parkland, where a second generation of wasp then develops on the catkins of a Turkey oak. On the same branch, Sam shows us a smattering of small disks attached to the underside of a leaf that look as though they have been spun from golden hair. These are Silk Button gall wasps, which will fall with the leaves in autumn and hatch from the ground from February. My daughter picks up a leaf, strokes it, and puts it in her pocket, inspecting it intermittently throughout the day. The third and final oddity we see on the branch is a cluster of ram’s horn galls. Like the Knopper gall, these are misshapen acorns containing wasp larvae and can be identified by two horn-shaped growths. First recorded in Berkshire in the late 90s, these have spread across England and Wales at a rapid rate.

We head towards a patch of late-flowering knapweed and Devil’s-bit scabious which is alive with honey bees, bumble bees and hoverflies. The kids find a mulberry tree and come back covered in crimson juice. From here, we walk across the footpath in front of the main house, which is gravelled and covered in white flowering yarrow. ‘We treat this as a nursery area,’ says Sam. ‘All this gets uprooted and planted out into the fields.’In the walled garden, the children pick physalis from the greenhouse as Sam explains that the same slow-growing principles apply here. ‘This was my mum’s flower garden but we couldn’t justify paying to keep it maintained,’ he explains. Instead, they employ a part-time gardener to grow organic vegetables using the no-dig method. Pollinator-friendly flowers such as marigolds, single-flowered dahlias, borage, nicotiana and Verbena bonariensis have been grown from seed and planted in blocks among them. (Jars of these fresh-cut flowers appear throughout our cottage, which is furnished with vintage wooden furniture from the attics of the main house and colourful Welsh blankets.) ‘Buying and planting flowers from pesticide-laced garden centres actually causes more problems than it solves,’ says Sam. ‘It’s far better to grow them from seed, or buy from a local plant sale.’
‘You probably think
of moths as brown
things that eat clothes,
but of the 2,500 species
in Britain, there
are only two that
eat our clothes’The vegetables grown in the walled garden are sold in the estate’s honesty shop – a kind of micro-farm shop that adjoins our cottage. In the centre of the room is a table laden with baskets of fresh produce: purple and white runner beans, rainbow chard, beetroot and buttery lettuce heads.There are bottles of Old-Lands apple juice to collect and trays of local eggs. The fridge is full of organic butter and milk, the freezer stocked with organic meat reared on Gwent Wildlife Trust land and loaves of bread made by a local friend. On the wall are rows of jars including Old-Lands kimchi, chutney and homemade meddler and bay syrup. On an old workbench, a slate sign reads: ‘Jumble from the attics of the big house’. Tea sets, spectacles, glass vases, a pair of ice skates and offcuts of fabric are piled up to be rifled through.

Opposite the shop, across the yard garden, is a nature room containing a library of reference books and a chalk board where guests are encouraged to record the day’s sightings. (Hedgehogs feature heavily. Sam has observed that they are much more common since they stopped using slug pellets in the walled garden.) There is also a stack of line-drawn maps of the estate (the work of illustrator Paul Boston). We carry ours with us all weekend, following the clues to a treasure trail that leads us to ten hidden boxes. Each box contains a unique rubber stamp (again designed by Boston). There are 11 to collect in total, including one hidden in the middle of the island on the lake. We are still out hunting for stamps at 8pm on Sunday when we are supposed to be packed up and on the road.

The treasure trail, the two-hour forest school session in an Edwardian amphitheatre, and the option to pre-order homemade meals (a just-baked quiche, sticky toffee puddings) are undoubtedly why Old-Lands now sees families returning year after year. ‘When we first took on the cottages, there were no returners, and we now have almost 80 percent return rate,’ says Clare. ‘People come here for a week with plans to go out to the Black Mountains or the Brecon Beacons, but they end up spending three, four, even five days here. It’s hugely rewarding.’
For all the challenges that lockdown has inevitably brought, there have been positives – Sam’s time has been filled with more biodiversity surveys (which double up neatly with home education) and tree tagging. He has also experimented with leaving larger areas of long grass within the designated historic gardens, to see if that impacts on the biodiversity.

The ethos at Old-Lands – ‘slow to change and careful of consequences’ – permeates everything they do here, although the Bosanquets are mindful of being too dogmatic. Sam recalls a cautionary tale concerning the reintroduction of yellow rattle: ‘Yellow rattle is sometimes called the meadow maker. It’s a grasslands plant that taps into the roots of grasses and reduces their vigour, so it’s brilliant for changing a grass-dominated field into a more flower-dominated field. But I had never seen it here in 40 years of looking. It wasn’t local and so I didn’t want to introduce it. I wanted to just take the plants that had survived here and expand them to the landscape. The Gwent Wildlife Trust pointed out, quite correctly, that there was no reason why it wouldn’t have been here: yellow rattle would have simply disappeared in the Fifties and Sixties when agricultural intensification started. Luckily, the decision was made for me when it accidentally found its way into the landscape, probably on hay-making equipment. We’ve since found it scattered everywhere.’ Clare interjects: ‘He’s not allowed to be such a purist anymore. We’re talking about my 50th birthday,’ she jokes. ‘We’ve got to get on with it!’

Old-Lands is a landscape in flux and the current incumbents are acutely aware of the complex, evolving dialogue surrounding what Sam calls the ‘twin crises’ of global warming and species extinction. As well as educating holiday guests with nature walks, the Bosanquets are intent on opening Old-Lands to the wider community, creating a place for idea sharing.

This summer [2020], Sam planned to host a series of free walks addressing topics such as grassland restoration, rural pollution and species management. The aim is to build up a community of experts and engage and inform the next generation of conservationists. ‘It is quite weird coming to live in a place like this,’ says Clare. ‘But the changes we can make and the education we can provide because of this stewardship we have, suddenly makes it feel valid.’  
old-lands.co.uk
WORDS NELL CARD | PHOTOGRAPH DAVE WATTS