Covenant Violation

The managing document for Blacka Moor is The Graves Covenant. It is absolutely not the Blacka Moor Management Plan written by SRWT. Every action planned and carried out by managers and operatives must be measured against the legal Graves Covenant of 1933. If not then somebody needs to be held to account.

It cannot be possible that any independent person reading the Graves Covenant, or Alderman Graves' related comments, would concede that Blacka should be managed via chainsaw and barbed wire. Those are both incompatible with the statement in the Covenant that Blacka should be be allowed to continue in a natural state. That cannot be compatible with killing and felling beech trees, birch, holly, oak and sycamore that were growing when the Covenant was written. In other words what SRWT has been doing is illegal. Nobody can get away with claiming that a legal document from 1933 can be put aside and indeed in 2006 the document was renewed by the Charity Commission which conceded that conservation could be carried out as long as recreational activity took precedence. The question that should be asked is "what did the Charity Commission understand by conservation?" Well it's fair to assume it would have consulted standard dictionary definitions. So let's look at them and see if any include the understanding that conservation might be about killing and felling trees.

According to the Cambridge Dictionaries conservation means:

"the ​protection of ​plants and ​animals, ​natural ​areas, and ​interesting and ​important ​structures and ​buildings, ​especially from the ​damaging ​effects of ​human ​activity"

Nothing there about killing native trees. 

The Free Dictionary says conservation means:
"the protection, preservation, management, or restoration of wildlife and of natural resources such as forests, soil, and water."

The Oxford Dictionary says conservation means
"the preservation, protection, or restoration of the natural environment and of wildlife."

So when the Charity Commission said that conservation could be part of the management of Blacka Moor it's fair to assume it did not mean the destruction of natural vegetation and natural landscapes. 

So the destruction of wild nature that SRWT is engaging in is violating the terms of the managing document for Blacka Moor.