From above, the contrast is striking. While the fields and farms surrounding it bake in what is set to be the hottest UK summer on record, one estate in Somerset glows a deep, vivid green — a living proof of what happens when you let nature do what it evolved to do.
The Holnicote Estate, managed by the National Trust in Somerset, has become one of Britain's most compelling demonstrations of nature-based climate resilience. Aerial imagery released this week reveals the estate's restored wetlands thriving in sharp contrast to the parched landscape around them — lush, water-retaining, and alive, even as rivers elsewhere run low and soils elsewhere crack.
"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," said Ben Eardley, project manager at the National Trust.
Years of careful restoration
The transformation at Holnicote has been years in the making, guided by a straightforward principle: give water back to the land.
Ecologists working on the estate have reconnected rivers that were straightened over centuries of agricultural intensification, restored reedbeds and floodplain meadows, and reintroduced beavers — one of nature's most skilled hydrological engineers. Beaver dams slow the movement of water through the landscape, allowing it to seep into the soil rather than rushing downstream. They create pools, raise the water table, and generate the complex wetland habitats that so much British wildlife depends on.
The United Kingdom has lost around 90% of its wetlands over the past century. What was once a rich mosaic of bogs, fens, marshes, and floodplain meadows — habitats shaped over millennia by the interaction of water, soil, and wildlife — has been replaced by drained farmland across most of the country. That loss has been costly: for biodiversity, for water quality, for flood risk, and now, as climate disruption intensifies, for drought resilience.
Nature-based solutions put to the test
This summer's extended drought has offered a rare, if sobering, opportunity to measure Holnicote's approach against the conventional one — and the aerial images make the result clear. The restored wetlands hold water, keep soils moist, and sustain ecosystems even under conditions that are parching landscapes all around them.
"Evidence shows that nature-based solutions can reduce flood risk, improve water quality, increase biodiversity and build resilience to drought," Eardley said. "Nature shouldn't be viewed as a cost of climate adaptation. It should be seen as one of our greatest allies."
It is a striking reversal of the mindset that shaped land management for most of the past two centuries. The instinct to drain, straighten, and control the flow of water seemed rational at the time — drier land is more productive, and faster drainage reduces local flood risk. But this approach makes landscapes brittle: productive in normal conditions, but vulnerable when conditions tip to extremes.
The Holnicote experience suggests a different path. A wetter, messier, more nature-rich landscape may be less tidy, but it is dramatically more resilient.
A model for the future
The National Trust manages over 250,000 hectares of land across England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. If Holnicote's approach were applied more widely, the implications for flood risk, drought resilience, biodiversity, and carbon storage would be significant.
Across the UK, thousands of kilometres of rivers remain straightened and constrained, and millions of hectares of former wetland lie drained. The question is no longer whether restoring these systems works — Holnicote and dozens of other rewilding projects have answered that. The question is scale and speed.
This summer's aerial images from Somerset are, in their quiet way, a powerful argument. As heatwaves intensify and water becomes more unpredictable, lush green wetlands on a parched English landscape are not just beautiful. They are a blueprint.
