Thriving with Minimal Intervention

If only they could accept that areas of historically exploited moorland should be allowed to slowly return to nature they would get much satisfaction from this land to the west of Blacka, part of the parcel designated on the map as an extension of Totley Moor. Only one path crosses it towards Stony Ridge.

It stretches across a wide part of land to the right as you walk away south of the car park on Hathersage Road. It's near impossible to walk on, the varied low vegetation being surmounted on a tussocky base.

A determined walker/pathmaker might, in time, create a route but that would be a pity. Its great advantage is 1) it's not grazed nor has been for as long as anyone can remember, and 2) wildlife on there are never troubled by humans.

Any proper appraisal of management strategies in the Eastern Moors should start here. This land was once grouse moor, relentlessly managed. It has been the subject of a regime of minimal management for as long as anyone can remember; arguably it was no management at all. Very, very slowly a few trees have begun to establish themselves here and that has benefited the wildlife, especially birds. Otherwise the low shrubs have wallowed in the freedom to create new patterns of vegetation (what the conservation mafia call 'mosaics').

Bilberries are in their element and so are the blackbirds and thrushes that come up this year from the dry lawns of Dore's gardens where worms are hard to come by. Many other small birds love this area as do deer and many small mammals.

Let's be clear. This is a vegetation cover in transition. It's not a garden, much as it looks like one in places. If it's untouched by man it will gradually change just as it has over the last fifty or so years. If it is managed it will also change. I am as certain as I can be of anything that the change resulting from management will leave it looking much uglier. Why? Because the people who would be making the decisions and the others who will be implementing them will be insensitive and incompetent. I would sooner trust nature and natural succession to go its course. It will look right. Much as they talk of plagio climaxes and this and that and quote pseudo-ecological expertise and biodiversity action plans (BAPs) they simply don't know how to keep a certain dynamic vegetation in a stable unchanging state; not at any rate without the kind of ugly intrusion that destroys any attraction it has for the visitor. It is, simply, industrial; and I can think of nothing that is more inappropriate. Unless you call it landscape gardening which they can't do because they haven't got the numbers of qualified gardeners. I have this feeling that the mindsets of these managers are sustained by an idea that a certain ideal of the chance lucky finding of dwarf shrubbery can be imposed all over in a fantasy land of favourable condition. Clouds and cuckoos come to mind.

Elsewhere the similar heather and bilberry based vegetation has become more and more encroached with birch because it's close to birch woodland and sheltered.

The promised cattle management has not worked and it won't, unless they use far more cows and for a much longer period of the year; and they would probably need sheep as well and a permanently based shepherd/herdsman to continually move them around. That herdsman would need to have such knowledge and training that you would need to pay him well.

There is really no alternative, as that woman once said in a different context.  Nature's own volition must be respected. In accepting this you give back some integrity to management. And each stage of the succession will produce its own natural beauty untainted by the grubbiness of the conservation economy.