Compare

In the unmanaged area to the top west of the Blacka boundary wall the stags were grazing peacefully at first light in rare morning sunshine. After a while they wandered down into the large patch of bracken that's become part bedchamber and part playground.

Every so often a head bounced up and then disappeared into the greenery. They've created a place of their own preferable in many ways to the grassy areas now occupied and exploited on an industrial scale by cows, an area the stags themselves were happy with a few months back but have increasingly shunned as the cattle have immoderately spread their waste  across it.

I remember it used to be common practice for gamekeepers and farmers to string up dead small mammals on fences; and passers by could see they were serious about getting rid of pests and predators. I think there are still places where it happens, anything from stoats to rabbits and even buzzards.

From a distance I wondered if that's what I was seeing in the sheep pasture. 

There is much more than this on several stretches of wire fence. Irritation caused by mites or other problems leads them to rub against the fence and it means the stock is not as healthy as could be. Those who try to tell me that the countryside is at its best with farm animals in fields and no wildness about at all will probably claim that this is not serious.

To me it is. I've seen farmers who say that wildlife threaten their business, badgers and even deer because they are not subject to dips and medication that farmers have to administer to their flocks. And we know that the badger is blamed for cattle problems that have been considerably worsened by the movement of herds.

But another side to this is that the land we are walking on is there specifically for public recreation. My experience of the land is not improved by seeing sheep in this condition nor the results of farm animals having been lying in their own waste. It is enhanced by seeing wild unmanaged deer whose coats look immaculate and whose alert manner could not be further from the coarse bored expressions on the faces of most farm livestock - suitable to the units of industrial production that they are. Why we have to put up with it in a site which could be a beacon for recreation alongside wildlife I don't know. Could it be that the concept of natural beauty is simply alien to these managers.