A force of Nature

One family’s steadfast commitment to Nature means the privately run Elmley National Nature Reserve in Kent teems with wildlife, including the country’s largest lowland collection of breeding waders, finds Clive Aslet

- Clive Aslet

THE Isle of Sheppey is not the first place you might think of as a beautiful landscape. At the confluence of the Thames and Medway estuaries, it generally conforms to the term coined by the filmmaker Derek Jarman for his garden at Dungeness, in another part of Kent: Modern Nature. In his case, that meant the Nature that survives in the shadow of a nuclear power station. There is no power station on Sheppey, but it is hardly manicured—low-lying and marshy, it was known by the soldiers posted here in the First World War as ‘mud island’. Indeed, remains of Sheppey’s 20th-century defences can still be seen in the remnants of concrete structures around the shore.

Prepare, then, to be surprised. In the lee of tall-arcing Sheppey Crossing bridge lies Elmley, site of the only farmer-run National Nature Reserve (NNR) in Britain. (It can no longer be called the only privately run NNR in Britain, because the Earl of Leicester now manages the Holkham NNR in Norfolk, having followed Elmley’s example. Not bad company to keep.) If you were parachuted onto the marshes one night, you might think you were on the west coast of Scotland when you opened your eyes at dawn.

Those dawns. Storm Dennis has yet to blow itself out when I visit in February, scattering the wigeon and other wildfowl to the further lagoons; there are still rafts of them bobbing on the water near the old Kingshill Farmhouse at first light. I heard them calling shrilly to each other during the night: the French call them canards siffleurs, whistling ducks. During the day, the flocks will feed voraciously on the grass of the marsh, as they fatten themselves up for the long flights they will soon be making to Iceland, Scandinavia or Russia.