Questions Being Asked

Why do such demonstrably silly ideas get accepted so easily? The upland conservation grazing nonsense is supported by supposedly responsible bodies like Natural England and National Park Authorities.

I have a theory which goes like this: the more people tell you something is right and go on telling you it's right the more you should question their reasoning and their motives. And when they tell you that it’s ‘obvious’ start looking around for vested interests. Every time I hear a BBC radio programme about the countryside or see a TV programme I get told the story that our landscape has been ‘made’ by certain farming practices and that it will only survive if it is managed in a certain way. And a key component of that management is grazing the uplands with livestock; the implication is always made clear that some sort of catastrophe will ensue if we don’t encourage sheep and/or cattle to graze on our hills moors and mountains. For God’s sake, we are implored, if you take away the grazing the whole of our countryside will ‘look different’. And people come to the countryside to experience the countryside looking the way it does now.

But at no time in the past has anyone sought to make this point. All the years that the look of the countryside has been evolving and changing it has done so as economic forces and as natural change have dictated. There’s never before been a top down dictat from unaccountable people telling us that it must look just so. Now I would hate our countryside to be ‘spoiled’ in any way, but the funny thing is that I’ve seen many things that have partially spoiled areas of countryside which don’t get anywhere near as much publicity as I would like. One example is the excessive amount of plastic sheeting around farms, another is the yellow flowered oilseed rape fields, another again is the mess made by herds of livestock on footpaths and around access points; and there are many more. But I don’t understand the aesthetics of those who claim more native trees on our hills will significantly reduce the appeal of the landscape. I love trees and I don’t see a natural regeneration of broadleaved woodland doing anything awful to ‘the look’ of the countryside – unlike for instance industrial forestry.

Hill farming subsidies contribute £15 or so from our taxes towards each sheep. Sheep farming is completely uneconomic. The job the sheep are doing is to eat young trees to keep our hills and moors looking the same. This is nonsense and expensive nonsense. If trees were allowed to grow or even planted it would help to prevent fast run-off of rainwater which contributes to serious flooding problems in the valleys. So Environment Agency funding is contributing to Environment Agency expenses!!

In places like Blacka Moor where a previously groomed grouse moor has been allowed to go its own way without sheep the beauty of the land has been shown to increase and wild animals have returned to take advantage of the less managed situation. Yes, there are issues around how open or how wooded we want it to become but those are easily resolved with a routine cutting of unwanted growth; and none of this needs specialist input, just good sense.