Our story began in 2005 when an advert was noticed, announcing the sale by the Greenwoods of Swanborough, of 20 hectares (50 acres) of land at the end of Kingston Ridge. 

A small group of local Kingston residents formed a committee to investigate whether we could buy the land to prevent any unwanted development or usage of the land.  It was quickly decided that we needed a legal entity if we wanted to buy the land.  Several options were considered, including setting up a charity, however given the fact that we were uncertain as to whether we would acquire the land the cheapest, simplest and quickest entity was opted for and a Private Company Limited by Share, Kingston Hill Fields Limited (registered number 05613356), was set up on the 4th of November 2005.  With the legal structure and a bank account in place we could now turn our attention to raising the money to buy the land.  Over the next six months Kingston residents raised nearly the nearly £180,000 needed to buy the land and pay the associated costs by buying shares in the Company, making loans or gifts.  The majority of money being raised by 43 local people becoming shareholders in the Company although others generously gave or loaned money. 

From our incorporation documentation lodged at Companies House we appear as the majority of companies in the UK running a farm.  We’d set up the Company up using model or standard off-the-shelf Memorandum and Articles of Association.   Also, if you look at our entry on the Companies House register, you’ll see that our ‘Nature of business’ on the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code is given as a farm ‘Growing of other perennial crops (01290)’.   Given that no discussions had been held as to what we would do with the land when the Company was set up it was sensible to use arable farming as the default as this is what the land had been used for up to its being offered for sale. Also, under the SIC classification, conservation was not an option.

Concurrent with raising funds prior to buying the land a lot of discussion went on to what we would do with the land and how we would run the business, lots of suggestions as to what we should do with the land were offered including creating a fishing lake or a vineyard.  However, given that residents had chosen to move to Kingston because of the environment - conservation was the obvious choice.  It was also one that everyone could agree on. 

To concretise our agreement of what we should do with the land and how we should run the company a ‘Shareholder Agreement’ was also drawn up.  While the Memorandum and Articles of Association state how we should operate under UK law, the Shareholder Agreement, our constitution, is the document which gives our own unique way in which we do this.  crucially it set the primary object of the Company as being to own and manage the land as a conservation area.  The Shareholders Agreement was a relatively straight forward document to draw up however the final version, being the fourteenth iteration over a five month period and only finally being agreed on a week before to completion, hints that it wasn’t a straightforward process. As is so often the case where many parties try to agree on something it only comes together at the very last minute.  One only has to think of Brexit or CoP26!  We exchanged contracts 24th May 2006 and completed 2nd June 2006.

The fields in rehab. The road to recovery

Given the long history of arable use it seems unlikely that seeds from the ancient past, when the land was downland, would have still been viable so we would in effect be starting from scratch in respect of downland plant species. We don’t know the extent to which the previous farmer sprayed the fields with insecticides, herbicides etc or added fertilisers to the land we know from soil samples though that the land was relatively rich in NPK. These artificially high NPK levels meant that species like thistle, nettles, dock would dominate until the fertility of the soil decreased sufficiently to allow plant species typical of unimproved downland to establish themselves. How long this transition period during which the chemical fertilisers would leach from the soil would take was unknown. Clearly it wasn’t going to take forever as farmers add fertilisers to the soil annually to top up losses, although most of the ‘losses’ would be in the form of crop removed from the field. We were able to initially speed the nutrient reduction by cutting and removing hay. While this may seemed like a perfect solution to continue with cutting and cropping hay, as usually done in July, did have drawbacks from a conservation point of view. July is a peak month for invertebrates and needless to say many don’t survive the cutting and bailing process. A compromise is to only cut half of the field in any one year allowing the other half to act as a reservoir for insects. While flowers are beautiful and a visible sign of the land returning to a more natural state invertebrates are the base of the food chain for so many animal species and without them the fields won’t attract a diverse range of bird species. There has been much focus on the catastrophic decline in insect species in the past decades. If we want to build a place for nature insects must be the foundation. That said grassland with its wildflower species is also in decline and wildflower-rich downland is an extremely rare habit one that we want to aim to build.

Building a nature-rich grassland is a long process. We are fortunate in having a SSSI, Kingston Escarpment, noted for Wart-biter Grasshoppers, Adonis blue and Small Blue butterflies adjacent to our fields. If conditions are right they will hopefully extend their range to include our fields.

See Recent Work for a rough timeline of our activities.