Premier League Pottiness

It seems to go with the job that when you attain high office you are obliged to mouth fatuous platitudes about things you know nothing about. Thus our Prime Minister at Question Time today telling us that our "beautiful uplands were only beautiful because they had been managed"; this was in reply to a question from Sir Alan Beith. It can be safely assumed that neither of the two had ever spent a single minute on Black Hill or any other treeless waste. Wainwright famously described it as a 'desolate and hopeless quagmire' . Many moorland areas are little better, having been managed to destruction by the removal of trees. Mind you I may be wrong about Cameron and Beith. They could just be the types to have spent time shooting grouse in such areas - though they would not have been there to admire the view.


What a difference on Blacka Moor, undeserving of its severe sounding name and lucky indeed that management of the sort so admired by those who spout conventional approval of upland management, stopped early in the last century allowing the landscape and wildlife to express itself with some eloquence.