INHALL: Eloise Kane - Wilderlands

Wilderlands is the story of our relationship to nature and the wild told over 12,000 years. The past is so often held up as something we need to return to, the idea that, left alone, nature could heal itself back to a time when we lived in harmony with the environment. But when was Britain last wild, and does anything still remain? Our landscape is the product of thousands of years of interaction between people and the environment, and the result of millions of lives lived within it. While nothing is untouched, it still has value: wildness persists even if wilderness does not.

I argue that our current crisis stems from a separation from nature that has been growing since the end of the last ice age, and that the term wild has become so loaded we no longer really understand what it means. Rather than trying to rewild everything, it is better to understand the backstory of how we got here so that we can unpick centuries of seeing ‘the wild’ as something without people. If we can let go of what we wish we had inherited from the past, we can make better-informed decisions about the land we actually have.

Eloise Kane is a historical archaeologist specialising in the relationship between landscape, people and animals. Her professional background is in heritage funding, community archaeology, and heritage data, and her PhD examined the role of hunting in British landscapes in the post-medieval period. She is Visiting Fellow at the Royal Agricultural University and an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Wilderlands is her first book and was published by Faber & Faber in April 2026.