Sir Charles Burrell, 10th Baronet, is an English landowner. He was educated at Millfield and studied Higher National Diploma in Agriculture and Advanced Farm Management at Cirencester Royal Agricultural College. Upon inheriting Knepp Castle Estate in West Sussex from his grandparents in 1983 he threw his energy into the farm business yet despite intensifying for seventeen years, farming on the heavy Sussex clay remained unprofitable. His damascene conversion to rewilding began after meeting the visionary Dutch ecologist Frans Vera. All 3,500 acres (1,416 hectares) of the Knepp Estate are now devoted to a process-led rewilding project involving free-roaming herds of cattle, horses, pigs and deer as the drivers of habitat creation. Since its inception in 2001 numerous Red Data species have returned to Knepp and populations of common species are rocketing. Knepp Wildland is now a breeding hotspot for turtle doves and purple emperor butterflies, and has one of the largest breeding populations of nightingales in the UK. Charles is the Chair of Rewilding Britain.
Burrell, Charles
