Wharncliffe Heath

SWT arranged a visit to Deepcar for members of the RAG to be shown round Wharncliffe Heath. The reason for the visit was to show what a splendid thing 'conservation grazing' is. This is because only a small number of the RAG has been persuaded that a farming regime on Blacka has any merit. Deepcar is quite a journey, so the hope was that we would learn something especially as we had to go across the worst of the city traffic for 7 pm.

The first thing to say is that those who made the effort to go were not the regular and longer established RAG members who know the issues at Blacka but a couple of people who have volunteered to butcher some trees in the past plus the CPRE man who may have attended the RAG three or four times. Plus myself of course, not really wanting to go but intent on making sure they did not come back with some spurious message about the case for conservation grazing being 'proved'. I'm sure this was the intention. But as it happens the reverse seems to be the case for the following reasons.

• The Wharncliffe Heath site is utterly different to Blacka because it is surrounded by woodland. All the high land around Blacka is treeless grouse moor.* (see below)


• Wharncliffe is well drained and dry underfoot, Blacka is wet much of the time. So the impact of farm animals is quite different - mud on Blacka, none on Wharncliffe.


• Lack of grazing on Blacka has allowed luxuriant bilberry to grow plus bell heather and cowberry. The grazing on Wharncliffe means none of those are present.


• Until SWT came along Blacka was a magnificently wild and unspoiled and unfenced romantic landscape and they've not yet totally wrecked it. Wharncliffe is utterly artificial and man made, crossed by fences.


• There are no red deer on Wharncliffe to do the job of keeping areas open. We all know that deer on Blacka make the presence of publicly funded grant aided bureaucratically managed conservation grazing completely unnecessary.
• At Wharncliffe they still struggle to control birch because the cattle and sheep are not to be relied on. They would love to have red deer. Blacka has wild red deer browsing all night and much of the day.

The lesson to be drawn from this visit is actually the very opposite of that Sheffield Wildlife Trust would have preferred: Organised and managed conservation grazing on Blacka Moor is best abandoned because a natural alternative is much better and has the advantage of continuing the success of many years when Blacka improved when no management was carried out.

* The point about openness is that when people complain about trees being cut down and fences erected to keep sheep and cattle on the land, apologists for conservation grazing, heathland management etc. are constantly telling us that people prefer open landscapes. This is to justify the grants they get for cutting down trees which keep them in management jobs when nature would rather allow trees to grow. For a good analysis of this visit Mark Fisher's site.