Bog Myrtle & Peat

Coming to understand that sheep have an important part to play in modern moorland management has been vital to my project, but I must say that it’s sometimes hard to swallow. Of all the small fenced off areas I have set aside for tree planting, sacrificial crops and heather experiments, the sheep have resented some more than others. The heather laboratory has withstood some fairly intrusive probing in July and August, and several of my tree fortresses have been buffeted by wooly heads over the year, but it was only in the last few days that the livestock has done any real damage to my work on the hill.

The oat patch, where a small but extremely instructive sack of oats were sown into raw peat in May fell victim to the depredations of the sheep at some point over the weekend, and although the oats are now well past, they had no qualms about stripping bark off two trees and smashing a third into non existence. The entire enclosure now looks rather like someone has mowed it with a lawn mower. There is no real harm done, other than the loss of a really nice rowan tree. Perhaps it will be possible to coppice away the dead trunk and protect the shoots which rise up from the stump. Who knows…

I headed up to the farm this evening with some heavy timber and nails to block up the gap, and I can only be grateful that my small scattering of larches and willows have not been touched, thanks to the fact that they were placed inside tree guards. As the winter goes on, the sheep will get hungrier and hungrier, so I had better look to reinforce all the other enclosures in case there are other break-ins elsewhere.