Sick as .... an Icon?

Here come shooters, photographers and the heather beetle onto the 'iconic' heather

The day that overpaid financial services employers and employees arrive to slaughter the grouse on heather moorland is also the time when those other shooters on the hills get out. This time they have their cameras to shoot pictures of the 'iconic' moorland  to insert in publicity designed to show how important their management is. We've seen this so often in PR literature from Eastern Moors and Sheffield Moors. It's essential that all pictures of this landscape are taken in August promoting the myth that this is what it's like most of the time. They will also tell us it is wild.

Any pretence that heather moorland is a wild or even semi-wild habitat does not survive examination however much hype we get from vested interests.  It's worth remembering this when it's getting the attention it is at the moment, with Peak Park publicists extolling the attractions of the purple heather and lots of publicity about the so-called 'glorious' twelfth on Wednesday. Purple heather is widely regarded as grand and wholly natural. The reverse is the case. It is so artificial it really needs men in white coats to look after it.

The fact is heather is a crop and its flowering in August should be seen in the same way as the yellow fields of oil-seed rape that we see in May. The intensive growing of heather as with other intensive crops lays it open to disease and attack by organisms that would not thrive so well in a genuinely natural setting. If you're an insect and you feed on apples you feel all your birthdays have come at once when you stumble on an apple orchard; you invite all your pals along you set up home and you all enjoy the feast. Hence the reliance on massive doses of pesticides. It's much the same with heather.

Heather is a crop grown for the benefit of grouse which are reared for the benefit of moor landowners who manage to persuade wealthy people from London and abroad to enjoy the fiction that they are hunters for a day.

But in many places this largely monoculture crop is sick. On Blacka and elsewhere it is dying from old age and also from the attentions of the heather beetle.  A close look will reveal that much of the heather which should now be purple is actually a rusty colour.

Not healthy at all. this emphasises the problems of relying on a mass covering of one crop. Grouse moor owners may try to rid themselves of the beetle by burning - success not guaranteed and of course what else will you kill? Here heather grows senescent and keels over; when scrub and trees are cut as well there is a resultant fire hazard from the dry dead heather. SRWT's solution? fire breaks scarring the landscape.