On Thursday Natural England’s madness must be stopped
A‘It would be laughable if they weren’t serious, and real livelihoods weren’t at stake’
CCORDING their own blurb, Natural England (NE) is the ‘Government’s adviser for the natural environment’. Technically, so says oogle google, they’re ‘a non-departmental public body in the United Kingdom sponsored by Defra’.
I’m not altogether clear how that works, as the various bodies combined under Defra’s wing all seem to overlap, interfere with each other’s direction of travel, and generally combine to widdle us peasants off.
For, as you can probably guess, all of them are pretty positive that they know best. Certainly better than us mere peasants, who might scarcely have a PhD to our name.
NE, however, have moved it up a notch in recent years. Unable to stop the destruction of the natural environment where urban people do their thing, they’re increasingly putting the screws on the farming community.
The latest is a travesty in the making. As you may have heard, a new Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) is being created in West Cornwall, covering much of the West Penwith moors. These are on a windswept run of ground facing the
Atlantic, typified by the protruding granite strata, mosaics of tiny fields, oft bounded by field boundaries dating back thousands of years.
Gorse and bracken infest the little areas of common between farms, and stone built farmsteads hunker beneath the Sou’wester gales. Many of the families farming locally would be able to trace their connection to the landscape ‘since the clergy learned to read and write’. Landscape and community combined is indeed already a national treasure.
But the way NE see things, they must be forced back toward some barely identifiable ‘natural’ state. The SSSI won’t just cover areas of undrained, unimproved commons and headlands, but will include many long-improved and worked fields.
There’s a list of things the farmers won’t then be allowed to do, including spreading lime on the acidic granite soils. For those of you who don’t realise what this means, it will – over perhaps a decade – see these ancient farms revert to ground so poor it will hardly be worth farming.
Some farms are currently milking 200 cows, turning the rich grass on these storm lashed hillsides into valuable dairy products. Under NE’s demands, their businesses will simply collapse.
I know very well what it’s like farming over granite – and, I assure you, those folk can’t realistically milk commercial scale cattle off the acidified ground that the NE plans will give rise to.
It would be laughable if they weren’t serious, and real livelihoods weren’t at stake.
You might argue in favour of protecting the bits of the patchwork that remains unimproved. But fields that were improved under direction of the ‘War Department’ in World War Two, or by Victorian ‘improvers’, and have been farmed since? Where is the sense in that?
NE are trying to displace the guilt people feel about urban destruction, fuelled by ever-expanding cities, airports, supermarkets, transport routes, factories et al, by tinkering with the places least spoiled.
On Dartmoor, we’re seeing a steady ratcheting up, to the point where, for the first time in my life, I’ve had to ask permission to graze the land I farm – land my direct forebears have grazed with the same families of ewes, cows, and mares, for centuries. Again, like my peers down West, we predate local church records. The SSSI designations were put on this land years ago… curiously, after some centuries of our having worked the landscape. You can imagine how insulting I find the concept of interfering over-educated outsiders, threatening me with the big stick, because modern society has trashed the planet.
The situation on West Penwith is even worse, where land being designated includes a lot of far better ground. It’s a bit like a Government ‘compulsory purchase’ of the productive capacity, only there’s no compensation.
To thrive, any society must have a good degree of personal property sanctity. You need to have a fair idea that what you work for will be yours tomorrow, or else why would you work for it?
For some, this is about to be stolen by NE, and this needs to be stopped before they get any more out of hand.