"The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose."
You might be surprised to find that there are still large areas of land in the UK where the landowner does not have the exclusive right to do pretty much what he or she wants. These are our mainly upland commons. On the other hand, of all the land in Scotland in private ownership, 26% is owned by 66 people, 33% is owned by 120 landowners, 50% by 343.
Scotland is a foreign country. They do things differently there – now. But in the past Scottish landowners were even more ruthless than English landowners in extinguishing common rights and grabbing exclusive rights of ownership and very little common land remains. And yet for those of us who believe that common, shared or community land use or ownership is vital if land – the environment - is to be managed sustainably, Scotland is now extraordinarily progressive.
Two things seem to have led to this progressive situation. The crofters in the western Highlands have been quite a dense and vociferous population, and their campaigning, rent strikes, land raids and agitation resulted in legislation in 1886 and 1891 giving them secure rights of occupation and use of the land of the crofting townships, even when the land remained in private ownership. This was a return to the kind of system once common throughout the UK where shared land-use rights prevented exploitation of the land by individuals. The crofters as the last refuge of the Gaelic culture and language were able to appeal to nationalistic feelings which still today fuel resentment at land ownership by English or anglicised landowners. What would be seen as the result of the class system in England is seen as domination by the Sassenachs in Scotland.
Since it was re-established the Scottish government has passed legislation aimed at supporting communities to buy land from landowners to use for the benefit of these communities, often using lottery funding. They explicitly regard the land-ownership situation in Scotland as unjust and regressive, needing to be changed in the interests of sustainable land management and, frankly, justice.
The idea that the government should be supporting local communities in this way seems extraordinary from this side of the border. Here land ownership may not seem so obviously unjust in the sense that there are huge numbers of private landowners, not the handful that own Scotland. But for many practical purposes the problem is similar – land is held privately, exclusively, and exploited solely for the benefit of the owner. The idea that the people or the community should have any say in how land is used has not gained much traction here. Which is one reason why the existence of quite large areas of upland common land in England and Wales is particularly important. On the commons that survive in our uplands the shared land-use rights that still exist restrain landowners from exercising absolute power over the land.
Before the enclosure movement, much of the countryside especially in England and Wales was either open fields worked in common and cultivated in strips, or was common grazing and ‘waste’. What this meant in practice was that the villagers of all classes shared in the use of the land. There was not the cult of private ownership that prevails today, and the commoners had mechanisms for managing the land in the interests of the whole community, and for the preservation of the fertility of the land. Villagers had many sources of income, cultivating their strips, grazing geese and sheep and cattle on the commons as well as doing day work for the lord of the manor and working at rural crafts. Enclosure extinguished their rights and converted independent villagers into day labourers dependent on employers, and started the development of the idea that owning land gave the landowner exclusive rights not only to exploit the land as he or she wished but to exclude everyone else from even walking on it. In these days when we are questioning whether owning land should give landowners the right to exploit their ownership in ways that are detrimental to the planet, commons become interesting, whether in new forms created as in Scotland, or in the existing forms that are found in Wales and England.
There are small relict commons all over England and Wales, 396,800 hectares of common land in England and 175,000 hectares in Wales contained in around 8675 separate commons. These are all places where land is safe from exploitative management, and they offer communities an opportunity to enjoy and sustain part of their environment, but it is the upland commons that offer the most exciting possibilities. The English uplands cover 2.2 million hectares (17 per cent) of England's rural land but 80 per cent of Wales', around 1.1 million hectares. Much of the uplands are commons. Farming in these areas is only possible because of subsidies. If the land had been fertile enough to be worth stealing, these commons would long since have been stolen by the rich and powerful, as happened all over lowland England during the enclosure movement, and in Scotland during the rush to create sporting estates. And the hill grazings are not simply barren and infertile – they are despoiled landscapes damaged by centuries of inappropriate land use.
One of the issues confronting those wishing to repair the ecology of our uplands is a form of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome whereby a degraded ecology is seen as the baseline, the historic ecology to be preserved. The Welsh Government, for example, and some conservationists, appear to believe that the degraded vegetation of the Welsh uplands is somehow special, to be preserved by the grazing of subsidised flocks of sheep. This is clear Shifting Baseline Syndrome – pollen records make it quite clear that the natural vegetation of much of Wales is woodland, and that clearance by grazing animals and man has converted it to its current state.
https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue48/4/1.html
In the uplands of Scotland much of the destruction of the forests was documented in fairly recent history, at the time of the Highland Clearances and the southern sheep masters, and it is less easy to pretend that bare hillsides are natural or desirable. Those who are unaware of what has been done to our uplands and think of these landscapes as magnificent wilderness would do well to read the extraordinarily trenchant prose of the pioneering ecologist Dr Frank Fraser Darling writing in the West Highland Survey (OUP 1955):
“… the Highlands as a geologic and physiographic region are unable to withstand deforestation and maintain productiveness and fertility. Their history has been one of steadily accelerating deforestation until the great mass of the forests was gone and thereafter a form of land usage which prevented regeneration of tree growth and reduced the land to the crude values and expressions of its solid geological composition. In short, the Highlands are a devastated countryside, and that is the plain primary reason why there are now few people and why there is a constant economic problem. Devastation has not quite reached its uttermost lengths, but it is quite certain that present trends in land use will lead to it, and the country will then be rather less productive than Baffin Land. It is possible that the wilderness value of the West Highlands for the jaded townsman will still be sufficient…but if (he) attains to an ecological knowledge he will not necessarily wish his wilderness to be the desolation caused by devastation of land by his own species…”
“The greatest value the mass of Highland land could give to the nation would be as a continuing productive wild land in which perhaps twice as many people could live than are there at present. The very fact of successful growth would be a satisfying thing helping to keep a forest population (my italics) happy living there cropping the wild lands but not mining them as they have been mined. This…would yield more to the nation than…subsidized devastation..”
Scotland is now experiencing a ferment of ecological restoration involving charities like Trees for Life, conservation bodies such as the RSPB, and major philanthropists such as the Danish owner of the Glenfeshie estate. Quite large areas of the Caledonian forests are regenerating, along with all the ecological richness that they once contained. I wish that Frank Fraser Darling had lived to see it.
And I wish that my nearest uplands, those of Wales, could experience something similar. In Scotland nationalism has, fortunately, contributed to the development of a new attitude to land ownership and land management which is leading to profound change. Why cannot something similar happen in Wales?
Although there is an orthodoxy in Wales that holds that deforestation happened in prehistory, in fact the Norman invaders’ enthusiasm for sheep farming is also a likely and more recent cause of the devastation of the Atlantic oak forests of the Welsh uplands, and sheep continue to graze the uplands in such numbers that only very limited vegetation, and hence a very limited ecology, survives. This has been encouraged by subsidies, and by schemes such as ‘Glas Tir’, promoted by a government that appears to see sheep farming as an essential part of Welsh culture and national life, and the thin grasslands of the devastated uplands as a unique habitat. And yet everything that Fraser Darling said about the Highlands is echoed in the Welsh hills.
What makes Welsh upland common grazings special is that whoever owns them – private owners, the National Trust, or sometimes the Crown – is unable to do much with them because of all the people who share land-use rights on these commons. In northern England and much of Scotland moors are often in the grip of the sporting estates that burn vegetation and kill predators, though in Scotland some owners with exclusive ownership rights are doing great work. Wales mercifully lacks the grouse moors of the north, but nothing can be done to repair these wastelands without negotiations between owners and commoners or changes in the law or in the subsidy regimes. This can happen, as with the “Stump up for Trees” project at Bryn Arw near Abergavenny, but as long as the Welsh Government retains its sentimental attachment to sheep and sheep farmers, and uses subsidies to keep sheep grazing all across the Welsh hills it will, dare I say it, be uphill work. Reform cannot happen until the large subsidies paid to upland graziers end and farmers are supported to restore the ecology of the uplands. That way they could, surely, continue being part of Welsh culture – a Welsh culture not so entangled with sheep must be possible. If they dropped the sheep shibboleth rapid change could start. Trees plant themselves, given luck, a fair wind and no sheep. And the mood is changing. Bodies like the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts are starting to publish discussion documents about the future of the uplands. In spite of their very British wish not to seem too controversial, these bodies are pointing out that our national parks are dominated and damaged by driven grouse shooting, and that burning the moors is ruining precious habitats and carbon stores. They point out that farming these areas is not economic, and counter the argument that grouse shooing creates employment with the evidence that rewilding does this far better.
https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/blog/rewilding-and-jobs-blog
The RSPB in particular, in the discussion document ‘The Uplands – Time to Change’, details the ways in which the uplands are deteriorating under the current regimes, and starts to sketch a vision for revitalised uplands. It concludes:
“The RSPB aims to play a full part in debates about future upland land use. We do not know all the answers but can envisage a different future for the uplands.
• Instead of being Less Favoured Areas, they are Favoured Areas because they provide so much that society needs and values.
• Instead of being places left over after development and production has taken place, they are identified and protected as the green lungs of the UK.
• Instead of being quietly neglected, they are at the centre of a rural renaissance. • Instead of relying on unprofitable activities to deliver public benefits as a by-product, we should support those who manage and look after our uplands on behalf of us all.”
Frank Fraser Darling lamented the loss of the Caledonian forests, and the devastated ecology of the Highlands. He would have been delighted to see what is happening in parts of Scotland, in Glenfeshie or Glen Affric, and on the Mar Lodge Estate, and the projects run by organisations like Trees for Life, forty years after his death. Tree nurseries are springing up everywhere to meet the needs for rewilding projects. Fraser Darling was not much older than I am now when he died, but I do not despair of seeing profound change in our uplands in my lifetime. I sense that we may be on a bit of a roll here. The fashion for rewilding and the urgent climate problem speak strongly to so many of us. We are realising that sheep farming may be the worst possible and least profitable land use for these regions. Least profitable not only for the farmers, but also in terms of all the less tangible but vital values that proper stewardship of the land can deliver. Change in the uplands could deliver these values - carbon storage, better water supply and cleaner rivers, flood prevention, rural revival and biodiversity revival, new rural jobs, profits from electricity generation feeding in to rural communities, ecotourism, beaver reintroductions… an endless list of benefits.
The hill sheep farmers might perhaps find that they enjoyed becoming custodians of the landscape instead of despoiling it at the taxpayer’s expense. Sheep farmers have lately had to pay £1 to shear each sheep of a fleece worth 80p. They have gone round every year cleaning off with the dagging shears the castanets of dried shit rattling around their filthy arses (the sheep, you understand). Then every autumn before the tupping season they give all the ewes a special shave to give the rams a clear run, as it were. They have seen their sheep eaten alive by fly-strike maggots, and have bent double for hours giving them oral worm ‘drenches’, or shearing them, a backbreakingly thankless job. They have treated the sheep scab with really nasty chemicals that assuredly have affected some farmers quite profoundly. I like to think some of them might welcome change. One farmer’s wife told me the best thing about going to London was the lack of sheep. They had been the soundtrack of her life, background noise during deaths and funerals, courting, weddings and childbirths. “I wouldn’t care if I never heard another sheep”, she said.
A visitor to our garden yesterday www.nantybedd.com told me about the commons blog. We are in Wales and witness the tragedy of the commons. I have now subscribed to your blog. Will be interested to read what you say about other countryside matters having been born and bred in the Welsh countryside and worked for Welsh public sector conservation organisations through my career. Now concentrating on caring for our little piece of the planet and sharing with others.
Thanks, for another brilliant article Richard.