The farm that went wild

It was the nightingale I liked best. Or maybe the auroch. The nightingale sang strong and marvellously sweet when all the other singers had given up, his voice filling the night. Each nightingale has a personal repertoire of 250 phrases made from 600 individual sound units.

I ran into the auroch at six the next morning: enormous, uncompromising and emerging from the bush with a formidable set of horns. Now it’s true that aurochs went extinct 400 years ago; they were the wild cattle of Europe, Asia and North Africa, ancestors of all our domestic stock.

But this wild and extraordinary place is full of free-ranging old English longhorn cattle, and their job is to reprise the role of the auroch in creating and maintaining the atavistic landscape of England. And less than a couple of decades back, all this was as rigorously managed a farm as any Cirencester graduate could wish.