‘To see a valley changing a tiny bit for the better every day is a wonderful thing.’
Conservation, farming and walking can coexist, says author Lee Schofield. And Haweswater proves it.
THE LAKE DISTRICT valley of Mardale is a uniquely strange place. Isolated, wild, bereft of town or village; flooded by the creation of Haweswater reservoir in the Thirties; intensively farmed yet partially given back to nature. It’s a perfect microcosm of the competing pressures faced by the Lakes: traditional hill farming, heavy industry, conservation, tourism. Nationally, these pressures often clash. Yet in Mardale and its adjoining valleys, they’re working side by side.
It’s a story told superbly in Wild Fell, an absorbing new book by Lee Schofield, ecologist and RSPB site manager for Haweswater. Since 2013 Lee has lived and worked in this wild Lakeland outpost, supervising two working farms and scores of conservation projects, and bringing together people whose viewpoints might seem irreconcilable.
But it hasn’t all been plain sailing.
“I was a bit naïve to start with,” admits Lee. “Before I came to Haweswater I’d worked on smaller nature reserves that were generally uncontroversial. Taking on two hill farms in the seething cauldron of the Lake District was very different. There was a very political dimension to it that I needed to get my head around.”
The first few years were tough, as the RSPB’s ecological aspirations came into conflict with hill farmers who had very different ideas about how the land should be looked after.
“It was bruising at times,” he admits. “But so much progress has been made, mostly by just bringing people together and everyone understanding everyone else’s point of view. Nine years on, it’s the best job there is. To have the potential to demonstrate what we’re doing and to influence ideas of land management on a bigger scale, makes it incredibly satisfying.”
Today, traditional pastures sit alongside re-wiggled rivers, regenerating wildflower meadows and new permissive footpaths. This is especially true of the side-valley of Swindale, home to one of the two RSPB-run farms.
“The great thing is that every time I walk up Swindale, it’s a little bit different,” says Lee.
“So many rivers are pinned in place by stone banks and levees and they don’t have the opportunity to change course and redistribute gravel in the natural way that rivers want to be doing. But in Swindale we’ve helped the beck to do what it wants to.
“So every single time I walk there, I see a pool that’s a bit deeper or a gravel bar that’s a bit taller or a tree that’s sprouted in a bank because some seeds have been washed down from higher up.
“To see that dynamism in the countryside makes that walk fascinating.”
Could you call it a rewilding? You could, but Lee is very careful with that word.
“It has become associated with an urban elite telling rural communities what to do,” he says.
“A big problem is that people tend to accentuate the more controversial elements of rewilding, like predator reintroductions, rather than just restoring the natural processes of seeds flowering and remeandering streams. Rewilding is an exciting concept; its benefits are huge and it has really engaged people. But it has also pushed a sector
of society away, so we need to treat it carefully. Sadly there isn’t a good, catchy alternative. I use ‘ecological restoration’ but it’s not as sexy.”
The other factor at play in Mardale is tourism. Considerate walkers are always welcome, but the lockdown summers brought immense pressure from less thoughtful visitors. When The Rigg (the coniferclad peninsula jutting out into Haweswater) was flagged up on social media as a great place to camp for free, Lee and his colleagues spent weeks clearing up rubbish, repairing fire damage and even clearing felled trees, while sheep farmers around the valley suffered huge losses due to gates being left open.
“The lack of education and investment in the Countryside Code is a real problem,” Lee says. “When I grew up it was everywhere, but it seems to have fallen by the wayside.”
Lee describes Wild Fell as his attempt to tell the warts-and-all story of this fragile valley: the wildlife and the people, the triumphs and the tragedies (including the loss of England’s last golden eagle, last seen in 2015).
It’s also a call to realise that when it comes to nature and farming, it doesn’t have to be ‘either/or’. “What you see in Mardale, and what I think we need nationally, is a patchwork of solutions,” he explains. “A way of making compromise attractive.”
The book ends with a chapter in which Lee imagines walking the valley in 2045, when the projects set in motion today and planned for tomorrow have come to fruition. It’s a breathtaking vision, full of joy and optimism, and forged by everyone being willing to give some ground.
And the best part is, as Lee says: “There’s every chance it could come true.”
Wild Fell is on sale now, published by Penguin. For more about Lee, visit leeschofield.co.uk and follow @leeinthelakes on Twitter, and for more about the valley itself, visit wildhaweswater.co.uk. And for a cracking walk in quiet Swindale, turn to Walk 16 in this issue.