Bog Myrtle & Peat

It was a fine treat to be invited down to Teesdale last week. I love the North Pennines, and always reckoned that if Galloway was wiped off the map tomorrow, I’d head straight for the hills between Alston and Wolsingham. That’s partly to do with the sheer quantity of black grouse in the area (probably the highest density in England), but also because the landscape has a tough, spare openness in which I feel very much at home. Much of this has gone from Galloway over the last half century as the hills have been planted with trees, but in many ways the North Pennines seem to remain much as they have been for centuries.

I was invited by Ewan Allinson, who is running the HeftedToHill project as part of a bigger Northern Heartland scheme. Not only was it flattering to be asked, but the more I looked into the project, the more it seemed to appeal. Because Hefted to Hill is about placing a value on local knowledge in hill farming – realising that the people who might have been working and maintaining a landscape for generations are a resource in their own right.

This kind of local know-how has been almost completely ignored over the past few decades, particularly by government agencies and conservation bodies. As a result, schemes and environmental plans are often set up without bearing much relation to the situation on the ground, and farmers are left scratching their heads in confusion. Hefted to Hill went out and spoke to a number of farmers in the North Pennines, and their conversations were recorded – many of them relate strange and lopsided encounters between farmers and “officials” – my favourite is this one, spoken in a tough hill accent:

“There was a fella out there trying to set up a Stewardship Agreement. And there was a bird flew up in front of him one day, a bloody big blackcock it was, and he said “oh, it won’t be a blackcock”, and “I said it would be” cos there’s a handful about but he wouldn’t have it, we couldn’t convince him”

I can relate to this, almost to the precise syllable. The amount of times I’ve met bird surveyors on our hill and have been treated as I was an imbecile is almost beyond counting.

I remember coming back down the hill after watching three black grouse at the lek one morning. I bumped into a birdwatcher along the way – a man who was being paid to count birds and report back to a renewable energy developer on the neighbouring land.

I asked him if he’d seen any blackcock and he replied that he hadn’t. I said “that’s because they’re out on the hill behind me” – but he shook his head. “They can’t be”, he said – “blackcock will only display within three hundred metres of a forest edge”. The birds I’d been watching were a mile away from the nearest tree, and it seemed a bit inflexible of him to say I was wrong. Whatever – I shrugged and was prepared to ignore the whole incident when I realised that he was actually going to ignore the birds I’d seen. Perhaps he simply didn’t believe me, but it felt more likely that he wouldn’t take my word for it because I was simply an amateur. If he’d gone up the hill, he could have seen them for himself – but he didn’t. I noticed that he’d been down along the forest edge where goshawks were nesting. I asked him if he’d seen the goshawks and he said “I can’t share that information with you”. Yes, that was an odd conversation.

You could say it was funny, but this kind of exchange has deeper ramifications. When farmers are ignored and their help is refused for long enough, they start to feel disenfranchised from nature. It’s been an unfortunate quirk of many conservationists that they begin to feel rather proprietorial about wildlife – that it’s “theirs” and that it cannot truly be understood by mere “outsiders”. But we all have an equally valuable take on the natural world, and in passing over the advice and wisdom of farmers, conservationists are often hamstringing themselves.

I’ve lost track of the number of farmers who are receiving payments to do conservation work which they think is stupid. It’s not that they aren’t invested in wildlife or sustainability – it’s simply that the agreement they’re working under is daft and could be improved. You could call it sour grapes, but the explanation for why farmers think the scheme is crap often starts with “Well, if they’d only listened to me…” But when you get down to what they really think, you see that the suggestions are often rooted in good sense and experience – a farmer will know when and where cows will use a hill – they’ll know what kind of stock to use for seasonal grazing, and they’ll understand why a fence across a certain contour will soon be pulled down or frayed against by deer. That’s not to praise farmers per se and demand that they all get a fair hearing. When it comes to conservation, some farmers have very little to offer – like the shepherd I met in the spring who couldn’t tell you the difference between a lark and a snipe and didn’t care either way.

Hefted to Hill is a genuine attempt to redress the traditional imbalance in conversations around land use. By recognising the value of local wisdom and pairing it with academic data and nouse, it will surely be easier to design management plans which actually work. I wish Hefted to Hill every success, but as I drove home in the darkness, I realised that as projects like this document local wisdom, heritage and tradition in Teesdale, there is nobody doing the same in Galloway.