Green Culmination

What you’re left with when you can argue no more is the simple fact the greatest contribution to the appeal of Blacka has been made by the absence of management over many years.

This week brings us the high point of the spring greening with trees at their very best,each leaf new minted with an extra edge of immediacy that you only find in May. Whatever the delights that suburban lilac and apple blossom bring they cannot beat the simple but vivid fresh growth on birch and rowan, oak and whitebeam self-determined in a natural setting with no gardeners in sight. The seductive artifice of Chelsea displays cannot compete with a newly greened wood and a blackbird’s leisurely improvising. This is the best of Blacka and the reason that people and variety of wildlife prefer it to Burbage and Houndkirk Moor. There are those strange old farming fundamentalists who claim to see the trees as all wrong because the land should be farmed and like a grouse moor, but their views are corrupted by a mix of self interest and warped conservation industry dogma, a lost philistine cause unworthy of attention except for those who no longer use their eyes.

It's worth looking back more than forty years to my first explorings of this region: The most striking thing about Houndkirk Road to me was always coming through the gates after walking over the sheep-grazed moor. With the acrid smell of sheep receding behind on the other side of the gate, I found myself abruptly among natural vegetation with wild flowers and it was as if the world had broken free of the chains of exploitation. Behind, on the managed side of the gate the grazed area stretched on remorselessly for a vast distance monocultured depressingly not by any quirk of nature but by carefully contrived and bureaucratically planned intervention with no free wildflowers blooming. We should never stop being astonished at this. People actually planned it. And we do need to remind ourselves just what people can do.

There are more beauties on Blacka, far more, than on all the local grouse moors put together, even in the depths of winter. But now in the splendour of May we see it clothed in youthful vegetation. Left alone for long enough this will change as a child changes into an adult. Hundreds of years create ancient woodland but it has to start somewhere. But now the mix of open and wooded areas created by succession and colonisation of native species is like a young child or immature wild animals with beauties of their own. The spread of trees across the old heather moor has an immense appeal to the deer and to the birdlife in spring. And visually it captivates, bringing swelling bilberry, cotton grass and young rowan and birch interspersed with older trees great playgrounds for cuckoos and warblers. The best of this is a testament to nature’s youthfulness, the young birch in the young woodland in the springtime and seen in the early hours of the day. All renewing one’s faith in regeneration; and that is needed.