28 August, 2026

This summer’s drought has left much of the English countryside parched, but aerial images from Somerset show one area that managed to buck the trend. Holnicote, a National Trust property on Exmoor, held its colour through five separate heatwaves this summer, while the fields around it turned brown.

The difference comes down to the estate’s rewilding efforts. Holnicote’s team has worked hard over recent years reconnecting rivers with their floodplains and restoring wetlands, with beavers reintroduced to help maintain ponds and waterways. Project manager Ben Eardley puts it simply: “For generations as a nation we’ve drained wetlands, straightened rivers and moved water off the land as quickly as possible. Here, we’ve reversed that approach and the results are remarkable”. They’ve created a landscape that stores water during drought and slows it down during heavy rain.

This is also true far beyond Somerset. Much of the UK has been in drought conditions for weeks. Meanwhile, critics of rewilding have spent much of this summer arguing the reverse, pointing to fires like the one that tore through a National Trust heath at Dunwich as proof that undoing conventional land management leaves the countryside more flammable. Devon Wildlife Trust’s Nick Bruce-White has laid out the evidence against the critics: nearly all English wildfires are human-ignited, and it’s drained, desiccated land that tends to burn fastest. He points to the Gironde fire in France, which swept through a pine plantation planted over what had once been marsh and wet heath, as a warning about what happens when wetlands are cleared for forestry.

Holnicote, having been consciously rewetted and reconnected to its floodplain, show us clearly the benefits of nature restoration, and held up under the exact conditions meant to expose its weaknesses. There is a lot of work ahead, though: the UK has lost over 90% of its wetlands in the past century, so it’ll take many repeats of Holnicote’s work to repair our wildnerness.

For businesses building out nature reporting under frameworks like the TNFD or ESRS E4, Holnicote is a useful reminder of what that scope of work is ultimately in service of. Rewilding builds resilience against flooding, drought and heat stress, simultaneously feeding the reporting metrics that end up in an annual report. With the odds of droughts and heatwaves striking the country becoming increasingly shorter, it’s worth asking: is the land being managed to store water or to shed it?

By Mitchell Keip