Moors for the Children

Let’s have Moors for the Children. And let the moors be where the enjoyment of natural and wild beauty comes first, land which is exciting in itself rather than just places where certain grown-ups go to shoot birds (in season) or to ride mountain bikes or for climbing and bouldering.  If, in the future, we are to have a landscape that helps to get children away from all those screens then it needs to be very different indeed to heather covered slopes managed by bureaucrats to stop nature doing what nature wants.   If we had more wildness and more wild animals then you would be struggling to keep children away from the hills rather than having to persuade them to go for a walk with you (or bribe them with a new mountain bike).

Experiences will vary. People too. But many have found that children have to be kept amused on country walks and that the walk itself and the place where you're walking count for a lot. Climbing high hills with challenging rocky sections such as many in the Lakes could be guaranteed to keep active children interested. They had something to aim for and they got a sense of achievement afterwards. Other countryside expeditions were not so easy: they could compare to a long car journey when you had to have a series of games and observation activities to amuse and distract them.

But long stretches of tree-starved moors could be guaranteed to bring on boredom to a unique level of intensity. Farmed landscapes and monocrop over-managed under-featured land areas going on for ever with nothing much to look at but heather and sheep were anathema to my children and others I knew. Large areas of useless land like Burbage Moor or the those stretches of boring heather back from Brown Edge and Flask Edge towards Totley Moss are places where nature should have the freedom to be itself.  Even for adults many can only enjoy them when they're firing guns across them at some hapless birds or riding bikes at speed or driving 4WD vehicles.

Rocky areas like Higger Tor and parts of Stanage are better. The wooded sections below some of the edges can be fine places for exploring as the trees and large boulders add a dimension. But even then the problem of grazing can ruin the effect as I always feel it does at Longshaw. If you do see a few flowers and a range of ground vegetation you feel they've been accidentally left behind. Generally the prevailing effect is the usual one of 'crop and crap'. And management never fails to leave its stamp.

Blacka Moor was different in that it was wilder: an over managed shooting estate where nature had fought back and was prevailing over anti-nature philistinism. And that is just what appealed to children of my generation and of my children's and I believe all. There were trees to climb and hide behind, also bracken and tangled undergrowth through which streams bubbled. And even when you did not see a wild animal you thought you could at any time. The imagination was not short of nourishment. Every part contributed, the path fringes were natural and uncropped, the lavish growth of shrubs like bilberry and heather, bulging and leggy their character unconstrained, there were flowers and fruit sometimes in abundance at ground level, and the air smelt sweeter - unlike the urine flavoured aromas often experienced at Burbage and Stanage with sheep never far away.

But instead of Moors for the Kids we have Moors for the Future - which should have been named Moors for the Landowners and Managers. Moors for the Future is another of those groupings that seeks to entrench the status quo. Remember that anything to do with land ownership and management is potentially controversial and the owners and managers are very well aware of it; so they seek to institutionalise the perverse and the unjustifiable and thus to ward off any attempts to scrutinise. And anything that is supported by the Moorland and Shooting lobby should be very seriously and forensically scrutinised. But how do you do that? Just exactly how does one 'cross examine' M. of the F.? It is a partnership organisation but a partnership of various public bodies and other publicly funded interest groups ( plus a couple of water companies). The question that springs to mind is where is the accountability. And where is the management transparency? Each of the public bodies is, in theory at least, accountable and somewhat transparent but how does one access key information, accounts etc of this partnership a setup which I'm sure is absorbing lots of public money and should therefore be totally open about its funding and costs and its management. The trouble is that once these groups get together in this partnership way they effectively distance themselves from public involvement and hence public questionings. And they certainly know that. That is why this kind of arrangement is becoming more and more popular with managers - see Eastern Moors Partnership and Sheffield Moors Partnership. The partnerships are outside the public bodies which are themselves under a requirement to be accountable yet as a partnership accountability is obscure.  What may happen is that each body is persuaded to contribute funds, usually waved through after a brief presentation or report. Probably the only place where discussion takes place about whether the money should be spent one way or another is within the partnership management structure which is not transparent and not publicised. At least there's no sign of such information on their website which is mainly given over to telling us what a fine job they are doing. I cant find information about accounts, nor of committee or management meetings. An example of how funds get allocated is in this paper. That also gives some idea of what our councils have contributed.