Valued Characteristics

There's nothing like rampant bureaucracy for muddying the waters and promoting confusion. To look at the Peak National Park's Local Plan and Core Strategy is to invite frustration. So many statements point in so many different, even opposite, directions that its serves only to empower the professional desk dwellers whose job is akin to lawyers and accountants in the city.

There's much talk of valued characteristics which are occasionally defined but always to leave room for a considerable range of interpretation. That's handy for those with a particular interest usually representing already powerful groups who have well practised arts for gaining favourable advantages.

Even then there's too much contradiction. This section describes Natural Zones some of which encompass the Eastern Moors:

*a quality of ‘wilderness’;
*relatively natural vegetation which is largely self sown;
*few obvious signs of human influence such as field boundaries;
*’open country’ which has particular importance for certain types of recreation associated with adventure and contact with nature;

If open country means the sort of treeless grouse moor that prevails in much of the landscape then it certainly can't be 'wilderness' with or without quote marks and it can't be self sown vegetation if the trees that want to grow are ruthlessly suppressed.

Here are some of the characteristics many of the visitors to Blacka value, though our wishes get little recognition.

The contribution of beech trees to the woodland here, especially the young self sown trees that illuminate the understory in winter.

The dead trees left standing, always looking natural.

The special character of woodland where natural and introduced species create their own habitat and atmosphere, e.g. the alder woods surrounded bya shelter belt of  rhododendron.

Mosses and lichens in late winter.

Dearly valued as these features are and despite the documents mentioning the word valued so many times, several of these attractions are under threat. Not from outside forces such as developers and economic exploitation as normally understood. But from the activities of the conservation economy itself which cannot leave anything alone lest an opportunity go begging to pull in grant funding. Beech trees have been identified by the local managers as non-native because they are considered to be features of southern England. One day we will find all the valued small trees have gone. Rhododendron which has contributed to the unique features of the alder woodland is already mostly cleared. Had there been no rhododendron those trees and the woodland would not look the same. Instead of relying on the entirely natural deadwood SRWT is creating its own via chainsaw and it looks as out-of-place as human intervention usually does. So far mosses and lichens have escaped attention from the meddlers but we don't hold our breath.