Rewilding Documentary: Creating the Kielderhead Wildwood Project
For this rewilding documentary I captured the creation of The Kielderhead Wildwood Project.
This is one of the most ambitious and inspiring rewilding initiatives in the UK. Spearheaded by Northumberland Wildlife Trust, it aims to transform a remote upland valley into a thriving native woodland — a living, breathing ecosystem that reflects the landscape as it may have looked hundreds of years ago.
This isn’t just tree planting; it’s ecological restoration on a bold scale. With a vision to reconnect fragmented habitats and reintroduce lost species, the project brings together science, conservation, and community action in a way that feels both urgent and hopeful. It’s a rare opportunity to witness nature reclaiming its place — slowly, patiently, and powerfully.
Nestled in one of the most remote valleys in England, where the Scottish Borders hover on the horizon, this bold ecological experiment is quietly taking root. The Wildwood is reintroducing something long absent from the uplands — native woodland. As the filmmaker documenting this process, I had the privilege of capturing not only the environmental transformation but the people and partnerships making it possible.
Rebuilding What Was Lost
The vision for Wildwood is rooted in the idea of restoring what’s missing from the upland picture: woodland. Inspired by the ancient William’s Cleugh Scots pines, this isn’t just about replanting trees — it’s about reviving a habitat mosaic that includes blanket bogs, heathlands, rocky flushes, and interconnected forests.
Every tree planted at Wildwood has a local origin. Volunteers collected seeds and scions from the valley, which were then propagated in local nurseries and reintroduced to the land. Some trees are direct genetic descendants of the Williams Cleugh pines, preserving a rare and important lineage.
A Project Powered by People
Volunteers have been vital to the project’s success. From hauling materials across boggy, uneven terrain to digging in saplings by hand, their energy and dedication have shaped every part of the Wildwood’s progress. Some travel hours just to spend a day planting. As one volunteer put it, “I come out because it’s absolutely beautiful… and because it’s satisfying to know I’m part of something that will still be growing long after I’m gone.”
The Kielderhead Committee, Forestry England, and partners from Newcastle and Cumbria universities have all played a role, making this a true collective effort. It’s a model of partnership — not just between organisations, but between disciplines: ecology, land management, history, art, and education working in concert.
Wildness as a Concept
Throughout the project, one question kept surfacing: What does wildness really mean?
For some, it’s a place untouched by human hands. For others, it’s complexity, unpredictability, or simply the presence of life that exists beyond human control. This rewilding documentary explores those shifting definitions, showing how the idea of wildness is as much cultural as it is ecological. The Wildwood is not only a site of ecological recovery. It’s a space for cultural reflection, shaped by contributions from artists, writers, scientists, and volunteers.
Each perspective adds depth to this rewilding documentary and helps expand the definition of “wild,” inviting new ways of seeing and understanding the land.
The Long View
Over 30,000 broadleaf trees have been planted to date. Mammals and birds are being tracked. Volunteers are returning season after season. The woods are beginning to take hold.
But Wildwood is only at the beginning. The hope is that in 30 or 100 years, this will be a dense, diverse forest — not because we keep planting, but because the ecosystem is self-sustaining. As one contributor said: “We won’t have to come back and plant 100 more trees — there’ll be 100 trees self-seeding.”
About the Film
This rewilding documentary captures the scale, ambition, and emotion of the Kielderhead Wildwood Project. It follows the story from the heavy lifting and muddy boots of practical conservation work to the deeper philosophical questions about what wildness truly means. It celebrates a growing community of people committed to restoring nature and rethinking our relationship with the land, and it reflects my personal approach as both a filmmaker and a storyteller rooted in place.
For this rewilding documentary, I worked with a carefully chosen set of equipment designed to let me film in challenging conditions without becoming intrusive. My main camera was the Panasonic GH6, which offered both portability and the ability to capture detailed, cinematic images, even in the unpredictable light of Kielder Forest. I paired it with a set of lightweight lenses that allowed me to move quickly between wide establishing shots of the landscape and intimate close-ups of hands planting trees or boots sinking into the mud.
Alongside the GH6, I also used the iPhone 15 Pro for moments where I needed to be discreet or capture quick, spontaneous details without interrupting the natural flow of events. Its compact size and excellent image quality made it an ideal tool for filming volunteers at work or documenting the finer textures of the wildwood environment.
Sound is just as vital to me as image. I recorded audio using a combination of on-camera microphones and discreet lavalier mics, which allowed me to capture both the quiet, reflective voices of the project’s volunteers and the immersive soundscape of Kielder itself: wind through the trees, the rush of water in the burns, the distant calls of birds. These elements help ground the film in its environment, making the experience of watching it feel almost like standing in the forest yourself.
My approach to filming this rewilding documentary was deliberately observational. I wanted the camera to feel like a participant rather than an outsider. That meant working with minimal kit, often handheld, and resisting the temptation to over-direct. I prefer to let moments unfold naturally. If someone pauses mid-sentence to point at a bird or if the light suddenly breaks through the clouds, those are the fragments that become the heart of the story.
Editing followed the same philosophy. I built the film not just as a record of what happened, but as a way of conveying the emotional and physical texture of rewilding: the exhaustion after a day of planting, the quiet pride of seeing a sapling in the ground, and the hope embedded in every small act of restoration. The equipment enabled me to work quickly and adaptively, but the aim was always to make it invisible—to let the people, the work, and the landscape speak for themselves.
This film is as much about listening as it is about looking. It is shaped by the voices of those who give their time and energy to Kielderhead, and by the landscape itself, which offers its own quiet commentary in every frame. By combining cinematic visuals with an understated, documentary style, my goal was to create a rewilding documentary that honours the wildwood not just as a project, but as a shared act of imagination and care.
🎥 Watch the full film and explore more of my nature and environment documentaries at:
👉 alanfentiman.co.uk/vimeo-videos/nature-films