Manor houses and stately homes are not the only dynastic family dwellings to be found dotting the English countryside. European badgers dig down rather than build up. Their sprawling networks of subterranean tunnels and chambers - known as setts - are, like many splendid country piles, at least in part the product of inherited wealth.
Unlike most mustelids - the family of mammals that also includes weasels, otters, martens, and the wolverine - which tend to be solitary, pugnacious animals that come together only to mate and dispute territories, badgers are highly sociable, living communally in extended family clans.
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Most setts are shared by six to eight adults, although one, in the grounds of Woodchester Mansion in the Cotswolds of southwest England (the location of a long-term badger study since the 1970s), was found to accommodate at least 30.
But clan size is not a particularly good predictor of the physical size of the sett itself. The largest setts are often those that have been occupied the longest and expanded gradually over years and decades by successive generations.
That in turn requires that they are resistant to collapse. Setts tunnelled into chalk may be particularly robust, and it’s no coincidence perhaps that the biggest one surveyed to date (and to be fair, rather few setts have been studied in detail) was found on farmland in the chalky landscape of the South Downs, a few miles north-west of Brighton.
In the early 1990s, biologists from the University of Sussex took the chance to excavate it before it was bulldozed to make way for a new road. They unearthed 50 chambers linked by 879m of tunnels, which could be accessed via 178 entrances. The sett occupied an area of 1744m², which (if we’re happy to trust the accuracy of Google Maps’ scale bar) is a bigger footprint than many a stately home can boast, including Woodchester Mansion in the Cotswolds.
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Top image: Getty
