Bog Myrtle & Peat

The cows are coming. Each summer, two lorry loads of cows come up from the tenant’s other farm in the lowlands and spend the summer behaving boisterously and making themselves unpopular. The shepherd is dreading their arrival, but this is the way things have been since time immemorial and nothing short of a major volcanic eruption on the Chayne can change it.

The beasts will be allowed access to almost every acre of the farm, and in some ways this is a good thing. Cows eat purple moor grass and other destructive species of undergrowth and their cowpats keep the flora ticking over with manure, but there are far more negatives.

Cows do not necesarily choose to eat young shoots of heather, but their very movement across the moor can damage heather growth and trample existing stands so that they will not be able to regenerate this year. I have spent the past month planting trees across the farm, and being forewarned of the cows’ exploratory snuffling and browsing, I have had to spend extra time cocooning  my tree guards in barbed wire. I doubt that all my trees will escape their attentions, but even if they are nibbled, birch will form scrubby bushes which contain a reasonable amount of nutritional value for black grouse.

The cows will use my tree guards as scratching posts, and if they are not strong enough to withstand the rubbing, they will come to pieces and expose the vulnerable whips to the browsing teeth of sheep and rabbits. Knowing that all my hard work planting trees could come to nothing because a cow wants to itch its bottom is quite nerve racking.