After years of visiting manicured parks as a child, I don’t think I’d ever come across wild scrub before. It felt totally different, a bit like entering through a hidden gateway to a thriving ecological past. Whether it was crunching across the snow, following mammal tracks, or standing in the late summer sun, watching barn owls ghost the meadows for hours, I felt such a freedom, as though my soul was slowly being rewilded along with the landscape.

In the 25 years that followed, my life inevitably gathered roles and tasks and responsibilities. Many of these were necessary or life-giving, but the accompanying mind-clutter was at points overwhelming. Two decades of local community work had led to over 3000 contacts in my phone, and like my phone, my mind had become a restless device, full of shoulds, mights and maybes. My mental health was really starting to struggle, so I had to make a change. After a lot of careful preparation, and discussion with my family, I decided to spend a year without a mobile phone.

At this point it is important to say that generally I am pro-technology, I think phones are important and can have such a positive impact on our lives. I don’t think everyone should get rid of their phone, though I do think it is important to discuss in community how we can live more simply in a complicated and frenetic culture. The link between digital addiction and nature-deficit disorder is clear and needs urgent attention.

Slowly but surely my mental health started to improve, it was as though my senses were coming alive again. I was walking round Strawberry Hill with my family last summer, exploring the wildflowers with our 10-year-old twins and their grandparents, I felt again that same freedom that I had experienced 25 years ago. The exhilaration of being in a wild place, feeling the hugeness of the landscape and the freshness of the breeze, mesmerised by Southern Hawkers, Skylarks and Speckled Woods, seeing familiar species as though for the first time, through the eyes of my children - learning to be amazed again, no longer so stressed and distracted. 

Strawberry Hill is important for lots of precious reasons - it is a biodiverse (and bio-abundant) lifeline in the midst of catastrophic species decline, but it is a lifeline for us too - in a digitally distracted culture of fear and anxiety, we need wild spaces. 

Written by Rev’d Chad Chadwick

(Wildlife Trust member)