Treasures in the Shade

Dropping down from Piper House through the woods in early morning is a journey from light to half light, deep shade then brief illumination.


Fungi explorers would have enjoyed this. I can't remember seeing as many Fly Agarics in a few minutes. They looked to have shot up overnight as slug blemishes were scarce.
Present nearby were Birch Boletes Brown Roll Rims, some I've forgotten the names of and some I've never learned. I would have been happy to find Saffron Milkcap but the Scots Pines are elsewhere.





















Wandering through the relaxed and unmanaged spaces it's a shock to come up against a reminder that Philistines have been here.

Why Burbage Should Not Go To The National Trust

Just a taster for the reasons that RSPB and NT should not extend their empire by taking over Burbage Houndkirk and the Hathersage Moors. There are and will be others. These reasons are purely on the basis of accountability.

A council is a public body. It is answerable to the public for what it does in particular its council tax payers but also the wider public. Anything that it does is subject to laws and regulations that have evolved over many years. These include requirements that guarantee transparency and fair dealing. If I ask for certain information from Sheffield Wildlife Trust they do not have to give it to me and what they might give has no standard requirements for accuracy. The same applies to the Eastern Moors Partnership who have simply ignored some of my requests in the last months. Transparency for the conservation industry is sending out a press release with a slanted story telling what they want people to think at a time to suit them. Sheffield City Council has to respond within 20 days. For a council, fair dealing is subject to challenge through agreed complaints procedures and with the possibility of reference to an ombudsman service. None of this applies to NT or RSPB or SWT. Recently even the Charity Commission has been taking a back seat in regulatory matters and only gets involved when serious fraud etc is suspected.

Handing land over to NT/RSPB takes away important and guaranteed rights just at a time when local people are supposed to be receiving more power over their neighbourhoods via the localism bill. Very timely, I must say.

Burbage So Far

The only official news out in the open about the determination of the NT/RSPB partnership to annexe what has started to be called the Sheffield Moors is the minutes of the SW Community Assembly meeting at Tapton School in March. I believe that the minutes of that meeting and the resolution were tweaked afterwards to show a more positive welcome for the Sheffield Moors Partnership than the discussions indicated - not an unusual happening. It goes in a pretty meaningless way to say that

".....further exploratory discussions with key stakeholders, including the people of Sheffield, to consider the benefits and feasibility of potentially extending the Eastern Moors Partnership model to the Council’s Burbage, Houndkirk and Hathersage Moors, be welcomed"

I don't know how you can welcome something that hasn't happened but nothing here is specific. I just know it needs watching.

Since then there have been some events which I've been able to glean information about. An ex-officer (another one) of Sheffield Council from Parks Dept-Nick Sellwood - has been recruited by NT to oversee the project within NT and he has appointed a project officer. A group of Sheffield Moors Partnership people unknown have attended an 'awayday' run by a group called Clearer Thinking - not to be confused with transparency, unless my FoI request brings some detailed information. Someone else from Parks and Countryside - possibly a David Cooper - attended. Paul Billington who is the Director of Sheffield's department that includes parks says that nothing is yet a 'done deal' but nobody's taking any more bets. All depends on Cabinet which I'm sure will be lobbied. Councillors will normally follow the lead indicated in the recommendations within the report and past experience suggests that decisions are in effect decided beforehand between directors officers and the resposible cabinet member - in this case Leigh Brammall assisted by Garry Weatherall.

Apparently these SMP people are coming up with some sort of Master Plan which sounds like conservation people who consider themselves masters of the universe. How much Natural England have been involved I don't know. I have so many questions about all this that I need to buy a new hard drive. I have FoI requests in on, 1) contacts with SMP involving council officers and awaydays details; 2) similar for Natural England; and 3) still awaiting request on RPA payments for Blacka Moor.

Being Candid

Recipe for Intrusive Dullness: The Eastern Moors Prescription

Now to cash in those credit tokens accumulated so far by pulling punches on the Eastern Moors Partnership's draft management plan.

Those hoping for an exciting vision leading to a landscape that thrills, that captures the imagination, that delivers the unexpected, an experience of a lifetime, will be disappointed but wearily unsurprised given the record of the conservation industry. Anyone wanting much the same as we've always had, but lightly dusted and spruced up, may be content. But there's nothing here to inspire a new generation to enthuse about wildlife on a landscape scale. Instead it's all about management, management and more management. That and "extensive grazing" which is what managers do. No wonder that the conservation workers I see are so keen to end their working week early on a Friday afternoon. If they do get out and about in the weekend they'll be as likely as anything to be getting their thrills from active sports like mountain biking for lack of anything thrilling on the ground. Much of this area is boring and dull for being artificially planned to exclude trees. It lacks secrets and a sense of wonder. What You See Is What You Get: The old fashioned northern industrialist virtues of Gradgrind so caricatured by Dickens. Any excuse for a bit more management protection - this species of caterpillar, that potential bird resident several thousand desperately uninteresting archaeological features that amount to little more than a few stones and a glut of speculation. By some clumsy implication the message is put across that all this will be irretrievably lost to the detriment of mankind if we allow the land to become a heart-warmingly romantic expression of the natural integrity that is latent within it waiting to escape the stranglehold of extensive grazing.

Of course you will find people who want it to be the same as when they were children with no natural change. Even power stations and pylons can affect some people like that. Well paid public employees in the natural conservation sector are rewarded to see beyond that. It’s as if Christopher Wren surveying the smouldering ruins of old St Paul’s and the streets around had said “Nothing that a couple of coats of paint can’t put right.”

Every professional vested interest seeks ways of embedding itself into the fabric of our culture and society. The law is saturated with examples and recent instances include the codified compliances of the health and safety industry. Intrusive as these can be they are intended to prevent people doing things which are deemed to be not in the interests of society. The conservation industry is unique in taking this even further: it seeks to stop nature doing what it wants to do! If this prompts a double take its justified: there’s scope here for a new comedy series. It is so amazingly arrogant. Artificial man made (and man-ruined) landscape types have to be protected – from nature! And the EMP management plan is full of the bumph all giving supposed pretext why essentially self serving plans have to be followed to the exclusion of anything remotely imaginative.
Sites of Special Scientific Interest
Special Protection Areas
Birds of Conservation Concern
Special Area of Conservation
International Union of ………. etc. etc. (contd on page 94)

Many of these don’t bear looking into. Every one is or should be disputable by the public and each embeds more and more strongly the controlling position of a defined interest group – the conservation mafia.

Not having all the time in the world I now append below my (draft) response to the (draft) consultation on the management plan of EMP. Anyone wanting to suggest other things please comment.

________________________________________________________________

Eastern Moors Partnership Management Plan

1 A missed opportunity: Three areas of contiguous public land could have been considered as one. There could finally have been a chance for nature and wildlife to develop and for the land to evolve with integrity over a substantial area in which there is freedom for wildlife to roam. A tragic failure of vision and ambition. This is a sad day.

2 "Wild and Open". Utterly perplexed at the continuing use and juxtaposition of these two words relating to this landscape. Yet their use here is key to what is wrong with this management plan. It is comparable to saying a man is tall and short, fat and thin, at the same time. It is forgivable for strangers with no knowledge of the landscape to make the mistake of calling this land wild, but for people claiming authority or expertise to quote them in an official document is bringing the language into disrepute.
When you call this land wild it suggests that wildness is something you value. It evokes a sense of anticipation and a sense of otherness, and a sense of mystery - something which captures the imagination as only a self motivating landscape with its free spirited unshackled wildlife could do. So why do you then produce plans to make it look just like you want it to look, with details of all sorts of farming style interventions designed to manage and impose human prescriptions? I’m struggling for suitable acceptable words to describe this – what do you call somebody who says one thing and then does the opposite? But this is an official document from an organisation managing a public asset. Micro managed wildness? Incomprehensible!

3 Why no proper consultation about the Agri Environment Scheme and the other ways of this being funded? Is this public land or is it not? Where is the money coming from? How much from public funds controlled by Natural England? How much from public funds from PDNPA and how much from members of NT and RSPB ?
Is EMP a charity? Will it submit its accounts to the Charity Commission?

4 Why is it necessary to cut trees below climbing edges? What next? Ladders and lifts? Surely climbing is an adventure sport with participants getting a kick out of tackling natural features? And seeing as the trees ought really to come over the top why not let them? Is nature wrong? How does one get to qualify to be god?

5 How do you justify doing something not mentioned in this management plan – but shouldn’t it be? – using a grazier from far outside the area, in Halifax!!? He will be one of two used and this seems utterly perverse. Speaking as one who wants no grazing at all and a purer natural and unfarmed landscape here, I’m told that I should remember the needs of the ‘local economy’. How local is this?

6 The process of supposed consultation has been calculated to guide the responses along certain desired channels. Despite a statement that EMP is ‘very transparent’ there was a refusal to disclose the names of organisations playing a key stakeholder role in this process. That is shameful. What exactly are the perspectives that are too problematic to even consider?
7 The "clear and transparent" policy promised for managing the red deer. They've done well without one for many years and have thrilled visitors. Leave them alone. Why does everything wild have to be managed?

Wildly Interesting

A short quote from an article in today's Guardian

" ... (that) British peculiarity: the desire to halt natural succession and keep ecosystems in a state of arrested development.
Heather moorland, a degraded habitat whose recovery conservationists are determined to prevent, is a good example. So is the sheep-cropped turf of many nature reserves. So is coppiced woodland. We manage them furiously, clearing trees and shrubs or preventing trees from growing to their full height, for fear of what they might become if we let go. As a friend of mine asks sarcastically: "How did Nature cope before we came along?" Conservation of this kind has nothing to do with protecting the natural environment. It's a manifestation of another national obsession: gardening."

George Monbiot's article and the comments below are well worth reading - the link is here.

Being Nice

..........or Being Kind. (see following day's post 'Being Candid', but only afterwards.)

The strain is telling. Attempting to be both positive and honest at the same time can tear you in two. Like trying to stay vertical standing on the deck of ship tilting 45 degrees. To me it may stand out a mile and a half that the consultation document of the EMP Management Plan reflects the most dismal failure of imagination yet can you really say that without offending? So I don’t say it, in fact I retract it ….for now.

“People have put a lot of work into that”, will be one response from past experience. That’s it then. Briefly you think of all those other things that people have worked very hard at (Moscow’s tenements, Kelvin flats, most present-day television, my singing, etc.). There is a strand of modern culture which feels the need to treat any project as if it's a worthy effort from schoolchildren who must be praised lavishly lest they get discouraged and need expensive counselling.

A failure to be positive about plans labels you as being negative, not constructive, condemns you,the commenter, as being a non person exiled from influence and stakeholder status, or beyond the pale (not 'pail' by the way). Some of our local councillors are a bit like this, I've found. If you complain about an organisation, a policy etc. they are prone to come back at you with "What's good about it/ them?" You know straight away that they are working to a formula: if this bloke only tells me what's wrong then he's just a belly-acher with no balanced view so I can safely ignore him. So it’s wise to have a comment like “Joe Stalin loved his grandchildren and was kind to cats”.

The great and always technically brilliant Australian operatic soprano Joan Sutherland understood this very well. An interviewer once asked what she thought of the Welsh singer Kathryn Jenkins and she replied simply "Nice boobs".

So let's find some positive things to say about Eastern Moors Partnership's Plan.

1 The pdf file shows it as being a fine-looking glossy document packed with pleasing graphic design features.
2 Some attractive photos litter the pages adding greatly to the overall positive impression.
3 The general presentation is of a professional standard indicating a good grounding in public communication skills.
4 We should give a welcome to the clearly drawn charts with well chosen symbols. It's easy to refer to.
5 Following on from 4 above, we certainly know some of what EMP is going to do, at least regarding what they say here, unlike Sheffield Wildlife Trust who present their RAG attenders with barely decipherable maps and charts as if they are afraid someone might understand them.
6 Unless they’re not telling us there is no suggestion that barbed wire will be a major new feature.
7 No wind-farm planned, no travellers camp, no caravan site, no concreting over for a skateboarding park, no skyscraper office complex for EMP, PDNPA, NT, RSPB, NE wildlife trusts and other conservation bureaucracies, (unless this comes later to administer the expanding empire).
8 No grouse shooting plans, (though links may be established with the grouse industry given the ‘gardening for grouse’ style of land management enabling grouse to breed comfortably on the Eastern Moors then fly over to be shot on commercial grouse shoots.)
9 An impressive collection of adjectives in the text: exciting, stunning, amazing, stunning (again), healthy (twice), sustainable (predictably), iconic (kept us waiting for that),and, inevitably ‘wild’ – (steady, remember the resolve to be positive) …..although I could not find ‘tip top condition’ this time. Otherwise boxes well ticked.

Having, I hope, earned myself some credit points I may be tempted to use them up in a coming post.

Supervised Play

Serendipity prevails here. If you set out to look for something in a wilder and more natural setting it's pretty likely you won't see it; but there's also a good chance you'll see something else as interesting. This morning was something of an exception. I found what I was hoping to see, and other things too. A bit of autumn mist and an early start to look for the deer having seen little of them on recent walks. Would there be any signs that we are not that far from the seasonal rut?



Well the large stag was well placed to look down onto the land where he (if it was he) ruled last October. And that's where the hinds were with their young. They were still very protective. A slight movement from us and a loud bark from the largest hind sent them all scattering.

Later the sun came through to reveal them more relaxed in a part only a few yards from the deep cover of bracken and woods.




This is an ideal place for some well supervised play. And when they are unaware of your presence deer can be playful. The setting is perfect with September morning sun warming their backs and an easy escape route behind them.



But the large stag, when he comes to make a move, may not have things all his own way. There was movement in the thick bracken to the north where an antler was briefly seen. Other pleasures were to be had too. The times before and after the 7.30 to 8.00 a.m. traffic were peaceful and birds fluttered. Not the swallows moving south west as yesterday but others.