Bog Myrtle & Peat

Black grouse struck my imagination like an avalanche. Fifteen years ago, I knew the birds only in passing from a pattern of chance encounters and the occasional morning at the leks with my father. Then for reasons I can’t entirely explain, the birds escalated into an obsession. While my interests have broadened over the past fifteen years, black grouse still hold my heart’s attention. But they’ve gone from many of their former strongholds in Galloway, and nowadays I find them only once or twice in the passing of a normal year. It’s fair to say that black grouse are doomed in this part of southwest Scotland, and while a few small pockets remain here and there, the trajectory is only ever down towards a point of final, staggering failure.

I went to Teesdale for the first time in 2009. Used to seeing black grouse in scattered gangs of two and three at home, it blew my mind to find them in glorious abundance on the roadside fields at Langdon Beck. They shuffled like poultry in the verges, and the leks were glorious affairs made up of twenty and thirty cocks at a time. Through persistence and dogged enthusiasm, I got to know some of the shepherds and gamekeepers there, and I greedily supplemented my knowledge of Galloway’s failure with a clear expression of how things used to be here. It’s a two hour drive to Alston from home, and on a fine day it’s possible to see my grandfather’s farm from the hills at Garrigill. And yet the difference between the two landscapes is monumental – as Galloway chewed itself into a wreckage of forestry, the North Pennines bathed in a serenity of permanence that was underpinned by the oxygen of grouse moor management. In the spring, the hills would ring to racket of wading birds; hares waited in every field and grey partridges stood aside to watch the mighty leks unfurl. 

It’s hard to see a future for driven grouse moor management in Scotland these days. Corrosive criticism and political pressure has disabled many of the moors I used to know, and some of the best conservation is undertaken in silence by gamekeepers who are already making plans for a future in another line of work. To some extent, grouse shooting has itself to blame for this crisis – but it’s also clear that discussions around moorland management have lost all sense of proportion and fairness. Noisy pundits emerge to criticise shooting as if it were the devil, and they would argue that there is nothing worth saving from the wreck of a destructive anachronism. Some of my work is now based on exit strategies for the sport; there is a baby in the bathwater, and if we cannot save grouse shooting from destruction, it feels important to rescue the most valuable aspects from the final furnace. After all, the future of waders and black grouse is intimately bound into driven grouse moor management – 95% of England’s black grouse are found on moors which are managed for shooting. Even if you hate the idea of driven grouse shooting, you can’t ignore the significance of associated predator control and habitat management for the future of many rare and endangered species.

I was asked to give a talk to farmers in Teesdale last night. I focussed on black grouse, curlews and hill cattle – but I was preaching to the choir in the back room of a pub near Eggleston. And having lost my own birds, I felt like a fraud in a place where curlews and black grouse are still super-abundant. But that super-abundance is precarious too, and it would not take much to overturn the status quo in Teesdale and Weardale. There is already considerable agitation to ban driven grouse shooting in England, and the impact of that change on this almost-holy place would be devastating. 

Driving to the talk on a bitterly cold evening, I parked my car in a layby above Langdon Beck for half an hour to watch the sun set towards Cross Fell. Seventy black grouse walked in the fields beneath me, and a litter of short eared owls turned above the whispering bog. For reasons best known to themselves, lapwings had returned to the hills for a few days in the early autumn, and they crept neatly through the rushes between rabbits and a spattering of swaledale sheep. Those lapwings were a reminder of this place in the heyday of April and May, when even their raucous displays are overwritten by the generalised uproar of redshank, golden plover, curlews and the soul-affirming gloat of snipe drumming. 

I’d readily concede that not every grouse-producing area has so much to offer in terms of biodiversity, and there are many moors which fall far short of Teesdale’s bounty. But there’s no great secrecy around the abundance of birdlife in the North Pennines – there are no guards or security fencing to restrict your view, and the birds aren’t hidden behind screens or locked gates. You can see it all from the main road – all you need is a sense of curiosity, a pair of binoculars and (perhaps most importantly) a willingness to concede that grouse moors can underpin tremendous richness and diversity. Visiting Teesdale is a kind of pilgrimage for me, and a remembrance of everything that has been so recently lost from my own home. And yet even here in the pitch of abundance, the future hangs suspended by a thread.