Ox Stones

This weather was not the best for visiting Houndkirk and Burbage. But then Blacka Moor had managed to please even under mist and drizzle earlier in the day when some excellent birdsong from warblers had cheered us up. Even at home the valiant blackbird and others were charming us from the rooftops and telegraph poles. This time I went to the Ox Stones, a feature in an otherwise drab expanse of heather which comprises Burbage Moor. My opinion has not changed. The place is an indictment of the conservation bureaucracy as feeble and blindly failing to distinguish between that which is worthwhile and that which is frankly a waste of space.

What a scandal this place is. I saw no sign of any wildlife at all unless you include the sheep droppings. You might think it barmy to imply sheep have anything to do with wildness but that’s just what the Sheffield Moors Partners did in their vision-defining awayday in July last year when they talked about the ‘wild and open’ and ‘natural’ landscape. To think of the history of the English language and the development of literacy and we now have people in fairly senior posts presumably well paid who happily debase the words we use. Should we compel them to eat a page of the English dictionary each morning?

These moors have value in proportion to what you are doing on them rather than having h any beauty or dignity of their own. Walking across them with a companion you can enjoy a good conversation; on your own you can be thinking out the wording of an essay or turning over a tricky problem in your mind. Once you start looking at the scene itself you realise that its character is more a lack of character and the best thing is to go back to talking to yourself. The precipitous rocks of Burbage Edge and Stanage are popular of course as cliffs and steep hills always are. But at and around them are miles of dreary moorland populated with miserable looking sheep – places that the game industry would love to get their hands on. The best way to thwart them is to allow nature to reclaim it encouraging a variety of other wildlife to move in.

Have you noticed that the people who manage these places don’t visit them for 11 months of the year? They only come in August. Just look at the photographs in their websites and publicity material. They portray a place where the heather is always purple. They have to do this because there’s nothing at all special about any other time of year. Every day it looks the same, quite unlike a landscape with trees which constantly changes.

As I approached the Ox Stones, the only distinctive thing around, I sensed something that I remembered from one of the earliest memories I had about Stanage Edge some 40 years ago. There was a cold north east wind but it was sunny: a good place to sit down admire the view to the west and eat our sandwiches would be those rocks where we would find shelter. The place stank from many yards away with sheep urine and all ledges were covered with faeces. This is now referred to as ‘iconic’. The Ox Stones also provide sheep shelter and it shows.

As I said all that these featureless livestock lavatories have to offer are places to do something else in, preferably while moving through them quite briskly. So without the radical changes that are necessary and unlikely to come from the conservation industry another 20 years will see them used more and more by people intent on speed and thrills – there’s nothing else for them to think about up here. Hence the bikers and motor bikers and 4X4 drivers and joggers who you'll be likely to meet up here. Those who seek natural beauty will continue to be disappointed if they’ve not died out themselves as a species.