THE Forest of Dean at dusk is a wild and enchanting place. Alongside the screeching of tawny owls and the occasional churring of the nightjar, visitors may also hear the crackling of broken bracken and a low snorting sound, indicating the presence of wild boar. From the 1990s, these extraordinary beasts have been calling the forest their home and there are now estimated to be about 650 of them in one of the country’s densest concentrations of wild boar per square mile. There are also smaller populations snuffling about in Kent, East Sussex, West Dorset, mid Devon and thriving communities in Scotland, where the figures are estimated at being between 3,000 and 5,000. Their story is an intriguing one.
As the wild ancestor of domestic pigs, the wild boar () was once a common sight in woodlands, arriving in Britain as the ice retreated in the early Holocene, the dozen Henry III ordered to be killed in the Forest of Dean in 1260 were the last free-living wild swine in England.
