Woodland Walk

The Shorts Lane entrance to Blacka takes you alongside the stream and past the stepping stones. On a summer morning it's a beautiful cool and sheltered place to be with various delights to capture the attention.

Many of our common wild flowers can be enjoyed including dog rose. This is at its best when glimpsed through the trees climbing up in a natural semi glade setting.

But wait a bit! What's happened here?

Where numerous pathside plants should be visible displaying their charms a broad swathe of the verge has been brutally power-strimmed. This continues on through much of the network of bridleways. Contrast this with the unmanaged glorious profusion elsewhere outside the Blacka boundary - a riot of colour and form typical of English pathside vegetation in June. My guess is that someone was sent down too early in the season to deal with bracken. But bracken does not become a problem until later and anyway not on bridleways. So it's another bureaucratic cockup.

Unfortunately this barbarism is not untypical of Sheffield Wildlife Trust's management. Inexperienced people with no particular liking for natural things are sent down by even less experienced managers to 'tidy up'. We first became aware of the scale of the incompetence shortly after SWT took over the management back in 2002. Having obtained a hefty sum from Heritage Lottery Fund they wanted to show that they were improving the place and looked to the bridleway network to do this. While many stretches of bridleway were in need of attention they chose to focus on a section that was in perfectly good condition. The reason for doing this seems to have been because it was easily accessible and would give few problems. One of their most striking innovations on a track that had previously harmonised well with its natural surroundings was the bedding in of numerous concrete kerbstones as cross pieces.

To understand SWT you need to appreciate their role in facilitating university courses. Higher Education needs to attract students and can only do so if potential students know their courses lead to jobs. A wildlife trust in a city of Sheffield's size is ideal to provide first jobs for those leaving university having done courses in wildlife and landscape management and sundry ecology related degrees. Most of these young people are plunged into a world of decision making they have not been well prepared for yet a proportion of them are convinced that their new qualifications mean that they 'know best' even when applying themselves to managing places they are scarcely familiar with. Many members of the wider public are reluctant to be critical because after all they are involved in an area that carries a lot of popular sentiment in its favour. And the more powerful institutions in the conservation industry put plenty of resources into lobbying and media management so that you can't watch a TV programme about the countryside without some spokesperson or other popping up telling us that our landscape has to be managed. Just think about it. It has to be managed - and the people telling us this are managers or teachers of managers or people whose own jobs are linked to the management of countryside in some way. It seems wise to be at least a little sceptical doesn't it? But not much gets heard in the media apart from slavish parroting of the 'need for management'. No wonder you hear ordinary members of the public repeating these things, people you would otherwise consider quite sensible and balanced. But then ideas do get a hold on the whole of society sometimes especially when they are promoted so determinedly and those of us on the ground who should know better timidly accept what seems inevitable.