Bartonsham Meadows
Bartonsham Meadows is a piece of land down by the river, a ‘ham’ in the dialect, a hundred or so acres of low-lying fields looped by the river and the river willows. I know it well, and have in the past lived in four of the nearby houses. It has been grazed by dairy cows for several generations of a farming family, and has been an important place to the community, who have used it for dog walking and swimming and, in my case at least, because it was the nearest open space that did not have the neatness of the nearby parks and was a good place for field mushrooms. The fields were not rich in species because of the constant grazing, but they were pleasant enough, and the cows made it feel like real country. Like almost all farmland in the UK it had lost much of its biodiversity as a direct result of being managed by farmers. Most of the hedgerows had gone, along with an orchard and several ponds, and maybe other features I don’t know about. But in fairness to the dairy farmers, they accepted the public’s use of this land. Many farmers and landowners like to assert what they see as their right to absolute and exclusive use and ownership of land, but these farmers were remarkable for their apparent acceptance of the way the community networked it with paths, all the more so since dog poo can be a serious health risk for dairy cattle.
A few years ago the dairy farmers gave up their tenancy and let it to a person I’ve heard described as a sub-contracting farmer, whatever that is. You are not allowed to just plough up ancient swards, but he did, and he planted it with wheat. It then flooded, and lost much of the newly vulnerable soil, and then a drought finished off the wheat. The farmer either left or was told to leave, and the land has not been farmed since. So far it is quietly rewilding itself. I’m told by one of the locals that as soon as the farmers moved out the skylarks moved back in.
The stakeholders now - a suitably agricultural expression, don’t you think? - are the local community and the Church Commissioners, who own the land. And people like me who, whether or not they have lived nearby, have a stake in how the planet is used and abused. The local community is represented by the dog walkers and by a local group trying to work out the best and most practicable way of resolving the situation, working with the local wildlife trust. I have been following their newsletters to see what their plans are. Their aims, as far as I can tell, seem to include safeguarding it for the community and managing it to improve biodiversity, to improve carbon sequestration and so on. The sort of important work that I’m often pleased to hear of, especially if it is someone else coping with all the frustrations this entails. There have been several plans. One would have featured a local ‘regenerative farmer’ who planned to market meat boxes featuring Hereford cattle grazing in sight of the cathedral, which, apart from sounding like a design for a school tie, involved cattle farting greenhouse gases, and no doubt alienated any vegans on the committee, but at least had the merit of getting a farmer to do much of the work. But of course we know that under farm management our biodiversity is suffering catastrophic decline, and there may be a strong case for rescuing this land from the farmers. As far as I can tell, and don’t quote me, the latest plan seems to be for it to become a riverside hay meadow overseen by the local nature trust, which would mean that the ‘work’ of managing it would largely be done by grazing animals in the winter and haymaking machinery in summer, and might involve less methane farting than would year-round grazing.
There are a lot of riverside hay meadows in the area, survivals of medieval ‘Lammas lands’. I will probably be heaped with obloquy or similar farm by-products for saying that, much as I love them, these meadows are fairly species- poor. Plenty of buttercup, some milkmaids and a few patches of fritillaries, but otherwise fairly unremarkable. There’s some knapweed, some ox-eye daisies and so on, but I’ve never seen any orchids there, for instance. I suspect the original meadows may have been spoilt by having potatoes grown there in the war. There are hundreds of acres of these meadows around Hereford, protected by the commoning tradition and by the wildlife trust’s ownership of many of the baulks, as the strips are known.
I found myself thinking that, facing the problems that the planet faces, recreating a meadow where there had been a meadow, which would be similar to all the other Lammas lands, might not be the most exciting option. My right to say anything to the people of the area, either as a past resident or simply as an occupant of the same planet, could well be justified, or could as well be challenged. I’ve not been to their meetings, I’ve not served my time on their committees, trying to balance competing interests of people and nature. And I’ve no wish to irritate anyone, to be seen as ‘pontificating’ or ‘getting on my soap box’ or ‘virtue signalling’ or otherwise to become a victim of one of those expressions the English use to discourage other people from either expressing their views or, maybe, being patronising.
All this aside, where there was a meadow there is now much vegetation, and a community exercised about the future of this land. This is not unique. There must be hundreds of similar situations up and down the country. If this was in Scotland the community would be able to use the Community Land Act which would champion their right to acquire land for their community, and could have financial support from the Scottish Land Fund to do so. When I last googled it, it had helped communities to acquire 90,000 acres of land, in some cases turning grouse moors into nature reserves. In England and Wales we do not have this legislation. And we have a basic assumption that all land is some sort of farmland, even barren moorland, which is another way of saying that almost all land, which is owned by a very small number of individuals, is managed exploitatively for their private profit. This has resulted under EU agricultural policies in rich landowners being given taxpayers’ money just for owning land. The more land they held, the more we paid them. Under the Environmental Land Management scheme with which the government plans to replace the existing system, farmers and landowners will continue to be paid by the taxpayer. They will be paid to not pollute the planet and not destroy biodiversity. Sounds like a protection racket to me – pay us or we’ll trash the planet. But while we do not yet have a government that recognises the iniquity of so much land being held by so few people, there are mechanisms such as crowd-funding that we can use to acquire land. In this case I believe that the local authority would be prepared to put up the money, so that the meadows could be owned by and for the community and not by an individual or an organisation determined to squeeze profit from it.
Which brings me neatly to the Church Commissioners, who own this land. You might imagine that they would support the community. You might think in a time of planetary emergency that they might want to protect all creatures great and small. They told me, in my C of E primary school, that the Lord God made them all. I am told that the bishop and the local clergy are supportive of the Friends of Bartonsham Meadows, but the Church Commissioners and their agents seem to have been quite obstructive, steered solely by commercial and financial considerations. I have been told that they have explored the idea of using any carbon sequestration on the meadows created by the activities of conservationists as leverage for getting planning permission for housing at another site, and that they and their agents insist that, if they do sell the meadows to the community, it should be at market valuation.
Someone needs to point out that they may be morally on extremely dodgy ground here, and elsewhere for that matter. The Church Commissioners were formed when Queen Anne’s Bounty and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were merged. Queen Anne’s Bounty was an 18th century endowment fund set aside by Queen Anne, who had invested very profitably in the South Sea Company which transported tens of thousands of slaves from Africa to America. When the Church Commissioners complete their report on the origins of these funds, now worth £9.2 billion, they may have to acknowledge a reputational problem and maybe a case for some kind of reparations, and contemplate a moral shift to a position more sympathetic to communities and less commercially focused. Maybe the local clergy, too, could feel less uneasy about the sources of their pension funds were the Church Commissioners minded to make some reparations.
All organisms have multifarious interconnections and interdependencies with each other. All plants depend on the world wide web of fungal mycelia in the soil, for example, just as flowering plants depend on insects. I believe that it is axiomatic that complex ecosystems are better than simple ones. Farming tends remorselessly to simplify; I am attracted to the idea of making the meadows as ecologically complex as possible while also retaining their value to the local community, which cannot be achieved by ‘modern’ farming methods. Meanwhile the land is rewilding itself. Some people who like to divide plants up into those of which they approve and those of which they don’t, find the early stages of this rewilding troubling, but rewilding such land might nevertheless be a popular and attractive possibility.
Rewilding is not as straightforward as one might think - there are various versions. Isabella Tree at Knepp Castle Estate in Sussex, who has done much to popularise the idea, seems to have great faith in leaving it to nature, broadly speaking, believing that interesting and unexpected things may happen. But nature has been much interfered with, and how it takes over may vary. At Knepp the previous close-grazed parkland would have had a limited range of plant species because for many years any flowering plants were grazed too hard to set seed, and even now some years into the project it seemed quite species-poor when I visited it a couple of years ago. But Ms Tree does not approve of introducing new species of plants to these meadows, preferring to allow nature to take its course. This is perhaps rewilding seen as an experiment, and it has given some interesting and unexpected results. More mobile species like Turtle Doves and Nightingales have found their way there, Purple Emperor butterflies have made an astonishing recovery, White Storks have been reintroduced, and so on.
Rewilding somewhere like Glenfeshie in the Cairngorms has been fairly straightforward because most of the elements of the original Caledonian Pine Forest ecosystem were present to some extent and could start to flourish as soon as the deer were culled and the sheep removed. There was not much need to contemplate reintroductions, at least of plants and trees. Further to the west, near the remnant of the Caledonian forest at Glen Affric, the National Trust for Scotland’s strategy, on areas too far from tree-seed sources, was to start with fenced plantations of local provenance trees that could kick-start natural regeneration as soon as the sheep and the deer were removed.
It may not, then, always be enough to allow rewilding to take its course; it is sometimes necessary to have a vision of the ecosystem that should exist in a particular place and help it to develop when it is too difficult for native vegetation to re-establish itself. If Ms Tree were to try to rewild the area of mid-Wales that used to be called ‘the green desert of Wales’ (many a true word!) she’d have to wait a long time for the forest to return.
At Knepp part of the rewilding strategy is to allow Longhorn cattle and rare-breed pigs to mimic native forest animals but also to demonstrate to other landowners that you can still make money if you rewild the farm, and to stop it getting so overgrown that it deters the visitors. This rewilding is a version of the ancient wood pastures and deer parks, where the stocking level keeps the land open enough for the public to easily enjoy it. And in other areas that are not farmed the notion that large herbivores ‘sculpted’ the landscape in the past has led to the use of herbivorous animals as a way to manage the land, and to make it more complex but also more accessible, by grazing and by creating paths. Wildernesses are not devoid of paths, though in some places when walking on a path you are likely to meet the animals that make and use them – bears, for example, or tigers.
If the locals were to decide to rewild the meadows, there would be a period when the land might have mainly docks and nettles, and though you and I know all plants are valuable, and that nettles are the host plants of about forty insect species, including four of our favourite butterflies, it would have to be managed creatively to develop an appropriate richness and diversity; if it was to be seen as valuable by those who walk their dogs there, paths would be needed. Some species might need to be introduced, some trees planted, but a small number of cattle or ponies would keep some areas grazed and the paths open without the need for much human intervention.
If you concede that rewilding may need some human help, especially in a fairly urban setting, then the possibilities begin to expand. Over the border in the Radnor valley there are remnants of the alder wood that covered the entire valley in prehistory. You can guarantee that here too there would have been woodlands of willow and alder and suchlike on the flood plain, and it might be time to recreate them. It is beginning at last to be respectable in conservation circles to recreate as well as to conserve. In America they are recreating open savannah woodlands, an ecosystem they had somehow forgotten about, and in Scotland recreating montane scrub at the tree-line is pretty hot stuff. This is an exciting time in conservation. With a little ecological imagination it should be possible to maximise the richness of community land while still listening to all the stakeholders. With Britain being revealed now, on the radio as I write, as being, of all the ‘developed’ nations, the one with the lowest levels of biodiversity, maybe ecological richness should be the priority.
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