Our drystone walls make the case against rewilding
Think of Dartmoor or Wales, the Yorkshire Dales or the Peak District National Park – you couldn’t imagine them without their dry stone walls. They seem to tie a hillside down as securely as string around the Sunday joint. The National Farmers’ Union feels the joy, because it has asked the Government to pay its members to maintain the stone walls on their farms. I support them. I’m just surprised the NFU has to make the case, given that the Agriculture Bill going through Parliament is all about reapportioning monies from the late unlamented Common Agricultural Policy so that they pay for things the public actually likes, rather than subsidising farmers according to the amount of land they own.
Still, not everyone is quite so pro-wall as I am. The rewilding lobby must hate this intrusion, imposed by humankind on the natural environment. They’d rather leave nature to reclaim the fields. But the argument is fallacious. There’s nowhere truly wild in these islands. Every part of them has been sweated for what it will produce for centuries, if not millennia. Some field walls in the Lake District are from the 16th century or even older.
Rewilding is only a façon de parler: at Knepp Castle in Sussex, principal flag-waver for the movement, they have a hands-off approach, leaving the vegetation to be shaped by hardy domestic animals, like Longhorn cattle. The result is an interesting kind of park, different from other south of England estates and with more butterflies. But it isn’t wild. When animals get sick or starve, they’re removed. In a real wilderness, they’d be left to drop, and a host of crows would feed on their corpses. The public, though, wouldn’t want to see that.
Personally, I’m happier with the stone walls of the Dales, preferably with a flock of sheep in view. My only worry is for the NFU. I remember the last time grants were made available for stone walls; a landowner from Lancashire complained that he could not get any further payment from that source because all his walls had been restored. There weren’t enough to go around. My heart bled.
Our countryside is human-made. Once, what we think of as idyllic landscapes like the Lake District were full of industry – some of it, like lead mining, pernicious. These days, it has other uses, like tourism, and the subsidy regime will pay farmers to block up drains and re-wet their fields; boggy land soaks up carbon from the atmosphere and prevents rainwater discharging too quickly into rivers and causing floods. Let’s hope that a scheme can be devised to rescue the hedgehog, whose numbers have crashed in recent years. In the Seventies, they were frequently observed two-dimensionally, having been flattened by car tyres on country roads. You rarely see that now.
An unlikely hedgehog fan is Brian May, who is campaigning against supermarket building works which he says will harm the hedgehog population. Paradoxically, he’s also famous as a champion of the badger. Brian, you can’t have both. Badgers compete for the same food as hedgehogs. They’re also able to unroll the curled-up hedgehog with their strong paws and tear its insides out – the noise is said to be tragic. As ever, it’s up to humans to decide what they want to see in the countryside. I love badgers too but it’s possible to have too many.