How Favoured We Are

Natural England's office in Sheffield is the Mount Olympus of the organisation, the National Headquarters. This is where godlike figures set out the fate of our landscape in broad terms without dirtying their hands with the details. Things that happen on Blacka Moor and around are determined by the Bakewell office situated in Deepdale Business Park on the road to Ashford and Buxton.

It's there that you might find officers getting down to what passes for real work, the production of papers and reports. What gets written on these papers, amazingly, actually affects how we walk and what we walk on and in.



So by deciding that Blacka Moor is in UNFAVOURABLE condition the officer makes sure that we have to walk in this cows**t. That is what it amounts to.To be favourable you have to have cows and their waste. We are all familiar with the kind of specious arguments that are employed these days and I guess they will try to explain it one way or another but this what it means. The more cows**t is on the paths and around the streams the more favourable it is.


This is not a joke. The moment the first cowpat dropped the official NE site description changed from UNFAVOURABLE to UNFAVOURABLE RECOVERING. It was that quick. Where would we be without them? When true favourable condition is finally achieved natural vegetation will be eliminated and we will obviously have wall to wall (sorry, barbed wire to barbed wire) carpetting of the brown stuff. Blacka Moor's faithful walkers can't wait.



NE's office looks pretty innocuous but word has reached this blog that there are certain resemblances to Colonel Gaddafi's compound in Libya. A network of underground tunnels is suspected with corridors and suites of rooms where major decisions are reached by anonymous committees. Within these bunkers it is believed that secret campaigns and wars are planned against such undesirable elements as tussocks and thatch and unregulated swards. Dossiers of information are carefully compiled and filed away in heavy duty cabinets relating to the number and position of such unplanned and uninvited intrusions as birch trees on grouse moors. This blog has assigned a special correspondent to follow the story.