An Unexpected Wilderness – Natural World: The Wild Places of Essex (2009)

Directed by: Andrew Graham-Brown | 50 minutes | documentary

The wonderful world of truly wild nature is often unanimously associated with exotic destinations where herds of imposing mammals roam the horizon and flocks of variegated birds inhabit the skies. In the industrialized West, on the other hand, man has left his mark on the landscape almost everywhere. Sometimes in a positive way, but usually not. The British district of Essex is one such region where the hand of man is prominent almost everywhere in the landscape. Essex is strongly associated with elements that do not exactly enrich the landscape, such as heavy industry, urban planning and the cheap neon glow of light entertainment. Many Brits smirkingly refer to the district as the waste pit of the ravishing metropolis of London.

Yet nature lover and writer Robert McFarlane embarks in ‘An Unexpected Wilderness’ (‘The Wild Places of Essex’, an episode from “Natural World”) on an intensive material and above all spiritual quest for the hidden natural treasures of Essex. Because for the keen observer, they can also be found in what appears at first sight to be a rather desolate region in the south-east of Great Britain. Sometimes they are refuges of modest size such as Epping Forrest, a beautiful forest filled with fallow deer, countless forest birds, badgers and a leafy autumn carpet, an oasis where the traces of human presence are limited to phrases scratched into trees by unknown messengers and modest quantities. litter. “The Epping Forest is really a place where a person who is looking for more than fleeting entertainment or the everyday worries can find himself, precisely by getting lost in an area where time and space take on completely different dimensions than in the rural landscapes we have created. and urban deserts. It’s amazing how much bigger even an externally tiny forest gets when you actually walk through it,” says McFarlane.

Other observations interweave the modern human world and the realm of nature in a sublime way. The best example is the scene where we see a peregrine falcon nesting on and elegantly flying past an ancient nuclear power plant, an unsightly concrete monstrum. The pristine and angelic is captured in an expressive image and united with the poisonous and artificial. Immense flocks of sandpipers and brent geese alert the modern industrial-age city dweller to the existence of a parallel universe, a world that occasionally opens its gates momentarily and gives a glimpse of an alternate reality that sometimes temporarily merges with our own. ‘An Unexpected Wilderness’ is above all a beautiful ode to the ‘everyday’, to nature that is, as it were, on the threshold of our front door. The documentary is also a philosophical quest for the spiritual value that the nature that surrounds us represents on a deeper human level. Because for the discerning person, nature is everywhere, whether it be a roadside, a city park or a lush forest.