Metalhead City Slicker Converts his Ancestral Castle Grounds to Ireland’s Most Ambitious Rewilding Project

There’s a lot of talk about rebuilding in Europe, where much of the wild country has been removed in the last 1,000 years, but it usually comes from radical farmers, not death metal musicians and filmmakers.

That is exactly what Randal Plunkett is: a living and functional testimony to the power of humanity to create change for a better future.

Faced with his lifestyle (as a steak-eating bodybuilder, death metalhead) and under the weight of his heritage (as the 21st Baron of Dunsany Castle in Ireland’s County Meath), Randal decided to take action to restore the dwindling number of truly wild spaces on the Emerald Isle by turning its entire 650-hectare (1,600-acre) property into Ireland’s most ambitious rebuilding project.

First settled at Dunsany Castle in 1402, the Plunkett family is one of the oldest Blue Blood clans in Ireland. A Plunkett was canonized after being executed by the Church of England in the 17th century, and another ancestor, Horace Plunkett, championed rural development and agricultural innovations in the early 20th century.

“I’ve never been a redneck,” Randall said. The Guardian. “I saw it as a burden, a life of servitude.”

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Now, however, concerns about the climate crisis and the destruction of his country’s native ecosystem have led him to turn his property over to nature, letting the grass grow and the animals run wild, a clear break with ideas of agriculture. of his ancestor Horace.

Green by nature and name

“The reserve is largely intact, with natural processes left to reshape the landscape,” said Randall, officially ‘Lord Dunsany’. European Reconstruction Network (ERN), which he recently joined. “There is no drainage, and the grassland areas are left to be grazed by wild animals, like deer.”

“The otters have returned, it is the first time the species has been seen on the farm in my life. We have martens, stoats, hedgehogs, foxes, badgers and owls. The red kite and snipe have returned. We have seen a huge increase in insects, with a massive increase in butterflies, and now we see many different species of bats. Even the endangered Irish species, like the scripts of quail, have returned. Nature is really flourishing, ”he added.

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With several small streams snaking through what is mostly non-forested land, there is room for natural processes to spread out and create that wonderful chaos that most ecosystems need to create substantial and resilient habitats and food webs.

Lord Dunsany isn’t keen to open up the property for much more than small tour groups, but as a filmmaker, he allows film crews to shoot, most recently for his own independent feature film. The green sea, named for that most impressive shade of green that covers much of Ireland, not least his family estate.

Private estates like those owned by historically royal families are often some of the best places in Europe to experiment with reconstruction.

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ERN details how Places like Bunloit and Glenfeshie Estates in Scotland, and Ken Hill and Knepp Estates elsewhere, are often the only ones that have the large country tracks that are no longer deeply agricultural needed to give rebuilding a chance.

As GNN reported last year, Knepp is a success story“A bankrupt descendant of lords who could no longer farm their land turned it into an English safari through the wilderness, creating one of the most biodiverse areas in England and eliminating their debts at the same time.

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