Questions Being Asked

Why do such demonstrably silly ideas get accepted so easily? The upland conservation grazing nonsense is supported by supposedly responsible bodies like Natural England and National Park Authorities.

I have a theory which goes like this: the more people tell you something is right and go on telling you it's right the more you should question their reasoning and their motives. And when they tell you that it’s ‘obvious’ start looking around for vested interests. Every time I hear a BBC radio programme about the countryside or see a TV programme I get told the story that our landscape has been ‘made’ by certain farming practices and that it will only survive if it is managed in a certain way. And a key component of that management is grazing the uplands with livestock; the implication is always made clear that some sort of catastrophe will ensue if we don’t encourage sheep and/or cattle to graze on our hills moors and mountains. For God’s sake, we are implored, if you take away the grazing the whole of our countryside will ‘look different’. And people come to the countryside to experience the countryside looking the way it does now.

But at no time in the past has anyone sought to make this point. All the years that the look of the countryside has been evolving and changing it has done so as economic forces and as natural change have dictated. There’s never before been a top down dictat from unaccountable people telling us that it must look just so. Now I would hate our countryside to be ‘spoiled’ in any way, but the funny thing is that I’ve seen many things that have partially spoiled areas of countryside which don’t get anywhere near as much publicity as I would like. One example is the excessive amount of plastic sheeting around farms, another is the yellow flowered oilseed rape fields, another again is the mess made by herds of livestock on footpaths and around access points; and there are many more. But I don’t understand the aesthetics of those who claim more native trees on our hills will significantly reduce the appeal of the landscape. I love trees and I don’t see a natural regeneration of broadleaved woodland doing anything awful to ‘the look’ of the countryside – unlike for instance industrial forestry.

Hill farming subsidies contribute £15 or so from our taxes towards each sheep. Sheep farming is completely uneconomic. The job the sheep are doing is to eat young trees to keep our hills and moors looking the same. This is nonsense and expensive nonsense. If trees were allowed to grow or even planted it would help to prevent fast run-off of rainwater which contributes to serious flooding problems in the valleys. So Environment Agency funding is contributing to Environment Agency expenses!!

In places like Blacka Moor where a previously groomed grouse moor has been allowed to go its own way without sheep the beauty of the land has been shown to increase and wild animals have returned to take advantage of the less managed situation. Yes, there are issues around how open or how wooded we want it to become but those are easily resolved with a routine cutting of unwanted growth; and none of this needs specialist input, just good sense.

Deer and Managers

In SWT’s first management plan for Blacka Moor the existence of red deer was not even acknowledged!

They were occasional visitors to the site even then but unknown to the trust and the majority of visitors. But since then the deer have established themselves as not just regular visitors but as a permanent presence and numbers have increased year on year. Their influence on the site’s vegetation is also increasing and will continue to do so. They browse on the low vegetation including birch and they occupy the bracken stands in ways that the cattle are unwilling to do.

They are there throughout the year and have started to breed on the site, at least one fawn having been born here this year. They are looked on by local people as their own wild animals however much SWT goes on about “Beautiful Beasts of Blacka” in various publications – meaning the cattle!!!

The astonishing admission from a 'wildlife' trust is that they don’t think that deer will do ‘the job’ properly. In other words deer don’t obey orders and conform to the management plan; more evidence if it was needed of the impoverished imagination of the trust. They seem incapable of the imaginative thought which means that wildness does not always give you just what you demand; in fact that’s almost a definition of it. But then what can you expect of those who want always to be ‘in control’?

Biodiversity Control Freaks

Those who espouse the cause of biodiversity above all else cannot at the same time be advocates of wildness. So a wildlife trust which plans to tame and control the landscape is a terminological absurdity. It may be laudable to protect species and even certain habitats, but to apply the principle uncritically renders you a control freak. There has to be a strong presumption that wildlife thrives on wildness.



The recently distributed paper from SWT with "Aims and objectives for biodiversity aspects (habitat and species) for Blacka Moor management plan 2007 to 2011" is a depressing read. Hardly a section of the site is allowed to be left to nature. More aptly we should call them a Tamelife Trust.

A genuinely wild garden created by nature with minimal intervention - a key part of the vision that was an outcome of the Icarus Process