Moorlands: A Wild Beauty in Decline and the Hope for Restoration

By Renee Karunungan

 

 

by Emma Montlake

Moorlands, the uplands where heather and bracken reign supreme over the landscape. There is more heather moorland in the UK than anywhere else in the world, from Dartmoor and Exmoor in the South, to Cumbria in the north of England and into the true wilds of the Scottish moorlands. Where impressive open landscapes and vistas provide expansive wild areas to roam, the horizons seem endless and largely unpeopled.

One may not know that this is a human made landscape – where over millennia the forest that covered much of the UK was felled for crops and livestock… around 5000 years ago. The removal of forest at these elevations led to the soils becoming less nutrient rich, acidic and created habitats for plants that like those nutrient poor soils and over time came to dominate.

The moorlands I have come to know so well and love, are in Cumbria. At least one annual walking holiday a year, it always felt like a pilgrimage. Driving up the M6 looking out for the textured moleskin hills, the first sign of entering a different realm, of moorland and upland, peat bog, tussock grasses, mountain streams, hidden tarns. “To wander lonely as a cloud, that floats on high over vale and hill”… the opening words to Wordsworth’s famous poem The Daffodils, gives a sense of what it is to walk abroad.

Water is everywhere, low and urgent, the frozen water that came before, the glaciers which shaped much of the landscape in Cumbria. Moorland is drama and otherworldliness of light refracted. And of course the lake district known primarily for its lakes.. Windemere the biggest in England, Wastwater the oldest and deepest and most beloved. It also holds the highest mountains in England.

Whilst the landscape remains in its romance of light and beauty much of the flora and fauna that made the lakes special is absent, sheep the devil of close nibbling teeth, over grazed uplands do significant damage to fragile ecosystems. The strange carnivorous plants of the Cumbrian uplands, adapting to the nutrient poor soils, the round leafed sundew once so abundant… strange sticky star leaves that capture small invertebrates to supplement a nutrient poor diet made more so by running water. Likewise the beautiful strangeness of the butterwort, also a sticky lure and death to insects consumed by plants. The plants revenge perhaps. These plants are hard to find now. The once so ubiquitous dung beetle is also now rare. Word on the street is that these important agrarian insects have fallen victim to the ingested pesticides given to the sheep, their poo heavy with poison is wiping out these wonderful invertebrates. And of course you cannot get away from the planting of non-native conifers. Though to some extend modern forestry management is removing these blocks on the landscape and there is some native tree planting taking place.

And so, as with much of our UK flora and fauna I have seen many changes, declines in biodiversity over the decades to this wonderful wild place. Recently talking to a farmer who farms at the bottom of the Duddon Valley, we discussed sheep, temperate rainforests and DEFRA’s landscape scale restoration. Whilst this farmer used to have 2000 sheep, he is now being paid by DEFRA to have fewer, 200 at the last count. This is a deliberate strategy to remove the sheep in this area, and in so doing restore the uplands, allow the temperate rainforests to renew and regenerate, to give the uplands the space from intensive sheep agriculture that has done so much harm to this iconic place. We constantly live in hope.