Randal Plunkett is an Irish filmmaker, landowner, and conservationist. He is the founder of Dunsany nature reserve in county Meath, Ireland’s largest privately owned nature reserve and at present Ireland’s only recognised large scale rewilding project.
Wild
A brilliant memoir-with-a-mission, Wild showcases how the gilded cage of privilege and aristocratic inheritance can be turned on its head, to become a personal journey toward fulfilment and making the world a better, more sustainable place.
Randal Plunkett is the most unlikely of aristocrats, with the most incredible of missions. Inheriting the title of Baron Dunsany in his late 20s, alongside Dunsany Castle and it’s 1,500 hectare estate in the heart of Co. Meath, Ireland, he found himself at a crossroads – hating who he was, and these new responsibilities he had no choice but to accept. Yes, he’d be the custodian of a gorgeous castle and huge estate, but the price he’d have to pay would be to submit his personal dreams to the collective responsibilities of the Plunkett family.
Before his father died, he’d told Randal to “start thinking about how you’re going to leave your mark.” The generations of Plunketts before Randal certainly had – his ancestors include a literal Saint, as well as the father of Fantasy fiction, education reformers, great artists, and many more besides.
And so, in 2011, Randal set aside a portion of the estate to see what it would look like when it was allowed to grow wild. What happened was amazing: as the grass grew long, flowered, and seeded. Butterflies, in larger numbers than he had ever seen, started to fly above it. Birds he had never noticed before started to call to one another from the trees. Hares – no-one in living memory had never seen a hare running in those fields before – made regular appearances.
Over the last ten years, where once his ancestors had grazing animals in the grounds, agricultural labourers hard at work, and horses for the hunt, Randal has let nature reign. The view from his castle is changing, year by year, as the trees, grasses, fungi, animals, and birds do their thing. The family church – sacked by Oliver Cromwell in the 1600s but otherwise hanging in there pretty well – is increasingly obscured from view. The outhouses for farm animals, built in the 1900s in a modernising sweep, are now repurposed for the rehabilitation of injured foxes, otters, and other creatures of the land.
The Dunsany nature reserve is now the biggest privately owned rewilding project in Britain and Ireland. It has attracted the attention of Universities, including Trinity College Dublin and of the university of Helsinki, as well as representatives of the Vatican and the Young Leaders of the Americas programme. Media outlets, including the New York Times, Radio France, Vice, the Irish Times, the Guardian, and the Irish Independent, have covered his work, and filmmakers James Cameron and Martin Sheen have documentaries forthcoming featuring Randal’s environmental work.
Combining the inspirational account of nature’s beauty and power of Isabella Tree’s Wilding, with insight into the weird world of the aristocracy we find so fascinating from Downton Abbey, Wild is a unique memoir of the joint importance of purpose, and of nature.