Paintbox Challenge

It may be a dull morning with drizzle in the air as we hope that the wind will break the clouds, yet the range of colours is vaste. everything is muted and without the sharp contrast and spectacular effects of recent autumn sunrises, but all would defeat me utterly even if I had any skill as an artist. The deep green of the scots pine acts as a corrective to the parts of the spectrum occupied by the bronze, the gold and the rust. Larch must win the prize, but birch is special too.

Further over towards Strawberry Lee Lane the beeches remind you that there are other hues and textures not seen looking down over the canopy of the wood. Not all trees join in the festival. Oak can find some party spirit but alder is in serious mood. Sycamore contributes nothing but gloom and a sense of decay.

See no Evil...............

.............. and no incompetence either.

Independent minded citizens of Sheffield will be familiar with a collective attitude commonly found within the city council and shared by other public figures and institutions. It is characterised by a serious dislike of any criticism and a touchiness about bad news related to the city. This probably dates back to the days immediately post war when Sheffield was fighting off an appalling image of smoke and grime, probably the very worst place to live in Britain. Having heroically pulled itself out of that and into a new cleaner era of smokeless zones it had a job to promote its new clean air and its fringes of green countryside; many in distant parts needed persuading that this 'new' Sheffield was really any better. It genuinely was better. But the defensiveness of the natives remained.

In more recent times Sheffield has taken to blowing its own trumpet to an alarming extent, not wishing to hear anything that could run counter to the positive image that the city's corporate bosses wish to promote. Anyone appearing to tell things as they really are is in danger of being seriously sidelined, castigated as congenitally negative. This kind of culture is dangerous because it leads to a disconnection with reality. Most who come to Sheffield from other parts of the country will recognise this from their own observations.

PR is unfortunately rife the world wide and no place is immune from the curse of absurd OTT positivity in which the tiniest achievement is overblown and serious flaws are played down. But Sheffield City Council has its own take on this - a culture which amounts to putting a gloss on problems in the hope that they will go away (and all complainants with them). Today's Times newspaper has an article about a murder in Sheffield which highlights this complacency.


At the murder scene, a senior police officer told reporters there was no gang culture in the city. “We have heard rumours regarding gangs operating in the area,” he said. “However, gangs are not prevalent in Sheffield.” Privately, South Yorkshire Police officers admit that the statement lost them credibility. If people had been frightened to speak to the police before, they just laughed now. The police, it seemed, could not see what was going on, so why should people risk their lives to help them? Burngreave and Pitsmoor are on a steep rise north of the centre of Sheffield. At the bottom of the hill, the city's political bosses seemed content for the problem to remain at a distance and, despite the best efforts of the local newspaper, almost unspoken.
Sheffield promotes itself as “the safest city” in England and does not want that image tarnished. Both its universities use the catchline in their efforts to attract the sons and daughters of respectable families. Strenuous efforts have been made to attract new investors and businesses to the city - including firms such as Boeing and Rolls-Royce.
Despite the recession, there remains a sense of affluence about the city centre. Construction sites bristle with cranes, grand municipal buildings have been refurbished and decorative water features adorn the pavements. Whatever was going on up the hill in Burngreave, the city that the outside world is supposed to see is the one that gave us the Arctic Monkeys and Jarvis Cocker, and was represented by high-profile national MPs such as Nick Clegg and David Blunkett.
So the city pretended nothing was happening and the gangs proliferated. They boasted of their drug wealth, brandished their weapons and taunted each other on Bebo and YouTube.


For the full article follow this link.

Not all examples of Sheffield covering its eyes and blocking its ears to what's going on are as serious as murder. But it's hard to walk about the city or work in it without getting a sense of it in usually fairly trivial incidents or overheard conversations. And sadly it can distract from the genuine good things about the city by destroying credibility. The relevance of all this to Blacka is not hard to find. Council officers and councillors too seem to be unable to grasp the facts, or see the evidence of sheer incompetence in the work carried out here. When concrete examples have been pointed out a glazed look comes over their faces.


See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil:

Season of mists.............

Continuing the poetic theme started yesterday, but the mellow fruitfulness is now well behind us apart from the odd bilberry and haw. There is not much of a poetic feel about the daily squelch along the soggiest footpaths ever seen.

One way of avoiding the sogginess is to keep off the paths and walk among the heather. This gives a different range of problems including the risk of sprained ankles and damp trouser legs. These do not seem to trouble the hinds seen this morning in the gloom.

No proper time of day..........

People grumbling about the current period of grey, damp weather should spare a thought for wild animals who are out in it 24 hours a day and in all seasons. Up on Blacka this morning once again the mist was rolling about, sometimes briefly opening out and then closing in, but always grey.

No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease

....as Thomas Hood famously described the month. Full poem here.

Just visible were the permanent residents contemptuous of occasional visitors like us.

A slight improvement revealed the usual group of three including the two hinds.


The stag is now eating with a much restored appetite. Maybe the rut is over now and he needs to build up some strength for the coming colder weather. He allowed us to get fairly close before looking up.

A Real Cause

Now this is a real cause for those who speak for the countryside. Wildlife Trusts, instead of demanding that immense spaces should be put aside and specially farmed for a small number of bird species that will easily adapt anyway, should protest against this. True environmentalists are concerned with the full package: scenery, landscape peace and beauty; the wildlife comes if all these are right.

Back in June Simon Jenkins in the Guardian was predicting this rush for money.

I rather sympathise with one commenter who said at the time:

Politicians are ***** scum. They say they're enviromental and go and do something like this. This is about preserving something that when gone will never come back. Real enviromentalists understand that nature is at it's best when it's left ***** alone

Real environmentalists are not necessarily wildlife trusts who have been known to do deals with wealthy interests if they can get a corner of some development set aside for their pet species.

But now it seems is too late to save a precious piece of our diminishing country.

Cattle or Deer? - or the Elephant in the Room?

I said in the preceding post that I would try to explain the reason why SWT make so much of domestic cattle in their publicity and so little (or nothing) of wild red deer. On the face of it you would expect just about the opposite. After all they call themselves a Wildlife Trust, not a farmlife trust. But the explanation goes to the heart of the differences between them and the local opponents of their management strategy. It's all about the priority given to heather moorland by the conservation industry. Those like me who have loved Blacka through all the years during which it has become splendidly wild are, to SWT, annoying distractions, non-believers who threaten their mission to take back much of the recent wildness so they can manage the place much as it would have been when a grouse shooting estate. years ago. Their role mapped out for themselves is therefore unremittingly interventionist and it conflicts absolutely with the parts of the vision that local people supported at the Icarus process - one which values a landscape with minimum intervention.

There's no doubt that when they found out that this is what local people wanted it sent a cold shiver down the spines of SWT and also their conservation professional allies. For once the conservation movement was on the defensive and its future was under threat. Wild landscapes with wild animals and nature going its own way left a doubtful future for those who had expected to earn a living following a career in just the kind of intervention that was suddenly being questioned.

If it became a more widely held view that places like Blacka could mostly go along very well without all those grant funded projects where did this leave the wildlife trust movement and all the graduates from courses that kept university teachers of these new conservation disciplines in employment?

Now, needless to say, those of us who supported a wilder approach - not going against nature - had not seen the implications of this for the conservation professionals, not initially anyway. It was only when we witnessed the reactions of SWT that we started to put two and two together.

Along with this we became amazed at the lack of presence of SWT on Blacka. You could visit the site every day for a fortnight and not see one of them; and they simply did not know much about it, even going so far as to ask us where things were. This didn't seem to fit with the determined approach to acquiring the Blacka lease from Sheffield Council that we saw eight years ago. And yet we kept being told that they had as many as a hundred employees! So what were they all doing? This is where we began to understand just what the modern wildlife trust approach to conservation entailed. The employees of the trust were spending most of their time doing desk jobs, applying for funds and grants which would then be spent using contractors and leasing out grazing to local farmers.

In response to the perceived challenge to their modus operandi an element of panic set in. One strategy was to delve back into history to try to find evidence they could publicise to show that Blacka was extensively used by man for much of its history. It had to be shown to be essentially a managed landscape to justify what they wanted to do so they looked back hundreds of years no matter what has happened to it over the last hundred of those years. Whatever benefits for wildlife it had accumulated during the years of wilding - summer bird visitors and red deer for example - the key thing for them had to be that man's intervention must be shown to be vital. Otherwise their own future was open to question.

Hence the bankrupt ideology of heath and moorland promotion a thoroughly artificial habitat utterly predictable and lacking the romance, imagination and surprise of wild land. They were instructed by their director and Natural England to espouse the artificial cause with zeal and enthusiasm although all seemed as forced and contrived as the landscape they were promoting. Cattle that they wanted to bring in to control the wildness were lovingly described in local papers as sure to attract sightseeing visitors. They told the council and attenders at their meetings that people had phoned their offices complaining that they were disappointed if they couldn't see them. Yet never a word about the red deer. Why is that? Because red deer came to Blacka not because it was managed by man but because the landscape was becoming more wild. To SWT the deer were the elephant in the room. They came in spite of their painstakingly written management plan. What did that say about management plans? That the single most exciting wildlife experience resulted from a lack of management! The more people thought about that the more they would be prone to question SWT's management.

SWT thought it was really clever to acquire highland cattle because they are considered to be cute. Mr and Mrs Joe Public, helpfully ignorant of the issues, would be sure to love them - after all there were familiar cuddly toys in the shops for their children. Hence the synthetic values of their approach became firmly entrenched.

Their desperation took an even more dishonourable turn when, last year, they wilfully defamed a group of the most regular attenders at their meetings - but that story has been told. Suffice to say that a genuine and powerful vision of a more wild landscape so unsettled their ill thought-out philosophy that it exposed something unpleasant. Who would have thought it?

SWT's leaflet

SWT's leaflet was brought out at the recent RAG meeting. I'm not certain why. It could have been related to the 'interpretation' theme, and it's possible that SWT want feedback from local people about its content. Blacka Blogger is happy to provide some feedback. It would be nice to be able to say something more complimentary but it's usually best to be honest. I would say the leaflet is a bit of marketing for the wildlife trust and manages to be pretty misleading. My problem is working out who it's aimed at. I have suspicion it's more directed at potential corporate sponsors and others who need to be impressed; this might include local councillors as well who don't know the site or its recent history. For such people accuracy is not specially important. You don't need to see much of their paperwork without coming to the conclusion that SWT's main concern is their own image and how they can promote it with branding and marketing stategies. They long ago gave up trying to appeal to those who are Blacka's regulars who soon worked out that SWT's written reports are at variance with the way things are.

Just some of the oddities and misleading things about the leaflet:

1) The cover picture is meant to give an accurate impression of what Blacka Moor looks like and hence something of its special character. It shows birch trees on the moor. The problem with this is that SWT don't want birch trees on the moor. These and others have recently been cut down as part of their aggressive anti-wilding pro heather moorland agenda.

2) The pictures inside include one of cattle. This is really odd because there is no picture showing red deer, our largest wild animal, permanently in residence here. In fact the deer are not even referred to in the leaflet! This seems beyond belief. If there is one outstanding wildlife phenomenon on Blacka Moor it is the red deer. Their presence captures the imagination of visitors. Cattle meanwhile were put on the moor for the first time last year (amidst much criticism), had not been on Blacka for at the very least some 70 years before and have not been on at all this year!

Yet considerable SWT resources have been devoted to telling people what a wonderful feature of Blacka Moor these domestic cattle are. And here they are pictured in their leaflet. This seems unbelievable. Yet there is a reason for this apparent absurdity, one that SWT are shy about confessing to and which I will explain in a coming post.

3) I was for some time puzzled by the phrase "The Blacka Brothers" headlined in the text. I even started to think they had found reference to a family called Blacka explaining the derivation of Blacka Moor's name. Then the penny dropped and I realised that someone had thought that the monks who farmed at Strawberry Lee were 'brothers'. I may be the only one who was confused by this. But still it's even more confusing if you know that the 'monks' were actually known as 'White Canons', as were all initiates in the Premonstratensian order (founded in Northern France at the town of Premonstre) who built Beauchief Abbey in the 13th century.

There's another point about the leaflet that always rankles with some of us. Its title is 'Blacka Moor Nature Reserve'. Blacka is only a 'nature reserve' because SWT call it one. Reserves are properly designated in this country as either Local Nature Reserve or National Nature Reserve. This is neither, and there is a very good reason why. It is charitable land with a prime purpose for recreation and to act as a public open space. The covenant on the land makes this clear as does a recent ruling from the Charity Commission. None of this is referred to in the leaflet.