Certain policies become so entrenched that organisations cannot change them without losing face. 'Conservation grazing' is a shibboleth of the charities that claim to speak for wildlife around here. The management of the sheep enclosure on Blacka is particularly indefensible. It can't be called a nature reserve and certainly not a public recreation area. It is managed so purely to get farming subsidies yet there is a covenant on the land saying it is for recreation and it has been designated SSSI for nature. In both respects it is a ghastly failure. Yet they are immovable; justifications keep being attempted however feeble and strained. The current argument is that the sheep are there to promote waxcap mushrooms. Well there are waxcap mushrooms on my lawn and no sheep graze there to my knowledge. There are 80 acres and more of this land and the waxcap mushroom interest occupies less than a couple of acres. Meanwhile sheep eat all the wild flowers and leave a disgusting surface of cropped grass and faeces making it unsuitable for any pleasant human activity, such as picnicking for example.
They only started claiming the conservation interest of the waxcaps in the last few years, much later than its original SSSI designation which didn't mention them. But they will always invent a new reason for what they do because they have spent such quantities of public money here, more lately on a long boundary wall to keep the sheep in. You just know that even if sheep grazing was shown conclusively to be detrimental to waxcaps they would invent another spurious reason for their 'conservation grazing'. A species of dung beetle perhaps?
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