Ruling the Roost
The Big Wood below our house was out of bounds. When my father – who never owned a cap, so could not go cap in hand, and whose hair had receded and left him without a forelock – went to see the lady of the manor about the house, it was made clear that we were never to go in the Big Wood. And any pheasant feathers found around our house might have us out on the roadside.
The Big Wood was fascinating, and I skulked around its edges, listening for kestrels and counting the weasels, stoats, jays, hawks and squirrels nailed up as a warning on the keeper’s gibbet. I never went in – frightened, maybe, of ending up nailed by the ears to that same gibbet. Except when I was old enough to earn two shillings and sixpence for a day’s beating for a pheasant shoot.
The estate was owned by a family who had made their money in engineering in Lancashire and had miraculously become gentry. The Colonel had died and insisted on being buried out on the hillside away from the riffraff in the local church, and the estate was run by a bailiff who looked like the Jack Russell carpenter in Beatrice Potter’s ‘The Roly Poly Pudding’. The daughter who inherited the estate was reputed to give her husband a chocolate bar and send him off to the Big Wood with his shotgun while she dallied with her latest fancy. On one occasion she was reputed to have cornered in the rose garden one of these fancies, who no longer pleased her, and covered him with her shotgun while saying “I bought you that jacket! Take it off!” and “I bought you those trousers! Take them off!” until the end of the story left him with or without his underpants according to the proclivities of the storyteller.
So the day’s beating for the pheasant shoot was a chance to get into the Big Wood and to observe these creatures. Were they and their friends the aristocracy, buoyed up by Jaguar shooting brakes, hairy tweeds and shotguns, or were they a rackety crew who might well end up in the Sunday papers? Maybe they were both. They all had glossy dogs, glossy faces, shooting sticks and tweedy plus-four suits. We were a crew of farm workers, village lads, the local policeman and such like dressed for a day crashing through the Big Wood, driving the pheasants by banging the trees with our sticks and shouting ‘Cock Up!’ or ‘Runner!’ as required.
In the valley below the wood ‘the guns’ stood at intervals at numbered sticks. The day’s sport was to shoot at a kind of bird that had never had a place in the ecology of the British countryside, except a harmful one, both in its own impact on the ecology and because it was preserved at the expense of all the creatures to be found on keepers’ gibbets. Our job was to frighten these birds into flying sufficiently high either to give ‘a good day’s sport’ or to minimise the chances of ‘the guns’ shooting each other.
At lunch time the ‘guns’ would go by Landrover for lunch in the big house while we went by farm tractor and trailer to the estate laundry, where we had plenty of bread and cheese and pickled onions and all the beer the village policeman could drink, and if we were lucky one of the guns would come in to patronise us. Then we went out again to trudge through freezing sprout fields trying to raise partridges. At the end of the day we all got our two-and-sixpence. Most of the pheasants, being virtually unsaleable, were pushed into some old quarry or foisted on the deserving poor.
Acting in this piece of rural theatre could either confirm you as a cringing peasant or send you in a more radical direction. The fact that last Christmas three separate people each gave me a copy of ‘The Book of Trespass’ ( Nick Hayes, Bloomsbury) may give you a clue about the direction in which it sent me, having had a glimpse of the kind of people who ruled the local pheasant roosts. They were of course much lesser beings than those who owned the grouse moors, vast areas of heather moorland where the sport was so important in the social calendar that Parliament itself closed so that Members of Parliament and of the House of Lords could exchange their suits for tweedy fetish garb and accessories and slaughter grouse in their thousands. (In August 30, 1888, Lord Walsingham was able to kill 1,070 grouse to his own gun, on Blubberhouse Moor in Yorkshire).
As I write the grouse shooting season is about to begin across the moors of Scotland and Northern England. The interests of the owners of 860,000 acres of upland heather, representing almost all of the heather moorland south of the Scottish Border, are promoted by the Moorland Association, run by the owners of these vast estates. This body reminds me of the ‘research bodies’ set up by the asbestos industry and the tobacco companies to pervert science in their own economic interests. The Moorland Association, helped by the acquiescence of bodies like the North York Moors Authority, energetically promotes the big lies that underpin grouse shooting.
The first big lie is that heather moorland is a precious natural habitat that is maintained by the activities of the grouse shooting fraternity regularly burning the moorland. This argument is quite paradoxical. A vast monoculture of heather is not the sort of thing that occurs naturally. And if it was natural it would not need to be vigorously maintained by grouse shooting estates. The Moorland Association, representing grouse moor owners, likes to claim that by their activities they are protecting and maintaining a unique and valuable landscape, featuring the ‘bonnie purple heather’. The North York Moors authority appears to have swallowed this story and perpetuates it where possible. So it is important to know that heather moorland is not the natural vegetation of the North York Moors, nor of the Pennines. Pollen research on the North York Moors indicates that the natural vegetation was a mixed and varied probably fairly open woodland. Throughout prehistory man reduced the tree cover, and early man often started agriculture in the uplands, but the major recent change was a loss of much woodland in the 17th and 18th centuries and the development of heather moorland starting when grouse shooting got going in the 1850s. “Management of moorland involves regularly burning the heather to maintain a vegetated environment blanketed with young heather, mainly Calluna vulgaris. Regularly burning the surface of mires will reduce the amount of organic matter deposited inhibiting peat accumulation and may actually damage the mire surface. This process also reduces the floristic diversity on the moors producing an artificial Calluna vulgaris monoculture. Management for grouse-rearing has also involved drainage of boggy areas and the construction of grouse-butts across deep peat sites, as for example on Yarlsey Moss in October of 1996. Severe fires have also damaged large areas of the moor as for example the fires on Wheeldale Moor in the dry summer of 1976, which damaged deep peat sites at White Moor and Blue Man-i'th'-Moss.” The same thesis documents the drop in pollen from woodland trees in the18th and 19th centuries followed by a steep rise in heather pollen from the 1860s onwards as heather moors were developed for the new craze of grouse shooting. https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/5369/1/289549.pdf
So heather moorland was created when grouse shooting became fashionable, by burning the moors to encourage heather, and grouse moor management by rotational heather burning perpetuates this and prevents regeneration of a more varied and natural vegetation. Meanwhile the keepers prevent a lot of other stuff, such as Hen Harriers. The Moorland Association likes to trumpet not only the bonnie purple heather but also the very few species of bird that can survive up there, which do not include Golden Eagles or Hen Harriers. Radio-tagged Eagles and Hen Harriers go off the radar as soon as they visit grouse moors, and mountain hares are also shot, in the belief that they harbour ticks. This is a sport for the lazy wealthy, which we are subsidising by classing grouse moors as farmland and paying landowners to own it through the basic farm payments scheme. The wealthy are very good at lobbying for grouse moors and pretending to be conservationists, but this is their second big lie. Most of our wildlife evolved not on moorland but in variously wooded landscapes, comparable with the part of southern Sweden that I happen to know well, where there is a more sporting form of grouse shooting. Here there are open forests with patches of bog and areas of heather and bilberry and bog myrtle and so on. Here the elk and roe deer, and traditional forest management, keep the forest relatively open and there are habitats for a wide range of native species, just as there would be here if we allowed trees to regenerate on our uplands. Here the grouse shooting, fjälljakt, is what we would call walked-up shooting, which involves walking through the forest and putting up and shooting grouse with the aid of trained dogs. We could have this kind of shooting, if we must shoot grouse, which could genuinely claim to coexist with conservation by allowing the natural tree cover of the uplands to begin to re-establish itself, providing habitats for a vastly increased range of native species as well as providing all the ecosystem services such as carbon storage, water retention and ecotourism. And if grouse are to be shot, it may be preferable and more sporting for the hunters to actually hunt and to shoot relatively modest bags rather than to have grouse driven towards them on an industrial scale in a kind of post-Victorian version of a shoot-‘em-up computer game. The kind of landscape we could develop would also have room for other quarry and would provide an environment where beavers could do vital conservation work without coming into conflict with farmers. And the Swedish example contradicts the mythology that the treeless heather moorland is natural and that grouse are totally dependent on it. The Swedish forests contain plenty of heather but it does not dominate the diet of Swedish grouse, nor does it dominate the landscape. If our grouse depend on heather it may well be because there is nothing else for them on these moors. In Sweden “the grouse diet varies with age and season. The chicks live for the first month mainly on insects. Adults and chick over a month old eat mainly the berries and shoots of bilberry in the summer and subsist on birch and willow during the winter”. {My translation from. https://jagareforbundet.se/vilt/vilt-vetande2/artpresentation/faglar/dalripa/}
The truth about grouse shooting in the north of the UK is that it is an ossified celebration of the wealth and status of a very small number of people, which depends on a heather monoculture where the grouse are sent over the top by beaters to meet a barrage of gunfire, First World War style. The estates, like superyachts, are among the trophies and symbols of power available to the super-rich, Increasingly criticised for standing in the way of a more humane alternative of managing the uplands for conservation, peat restoration, water retention, biodiversity repair , carbon storage and so on, they retaliate by claiming to be significant employers. There is growing evidence that rewilding these areas would create significantly more jobs than grouse shooting, [ https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/blog/rewilding-and-jobs-blog ]
In Scotland grouse shooting is coming under some pressure, with the threat of grouse shoots having to be licensed and having to comply with conditions like … not shooting Golden Eagles. ( Land owned by the Buccleuch Estates, where a recent experiment demonstrated that driven grouse shooting was not possible without shooting birds of prey such as the protected Hen Harriers, has now been acquired by the local community; part of it will become a nature reserve.
https://www.langholminitiative.org.uk/
In England organisations like Wild Justice are making the case against driven grouse shooting, but the political climate, with so much power in the hands of public school boys, is not conducive to any change soon. Wales offers more hope – grouse and public school boys are both thinner on the ground.
Footnote
The people who own the moors and perpetuate the Victorian anachronism and ecological disaster area that is grouse shooting include the Raby Estate, 30,000acres for which in 2016 Lord Barnard netted £683,575 in farm subsidies; Gunnerside Estate, RW Miller, offshore businessman, 26,020 acres, £100,632; East Allenheads and Muggleswick Estate, J Herrman, hedge fund manager, 26,000 acres, £145,288; Abbeystead Estate, 23.000 acres, Duke of Westminster, £57,228. The list stretches on and includes the comparatively modest Lilburn Estate, only 14,678 acres, owned by Duncan Davidson, the founder of Persimmon Homes, who trousered an astonishing £1,550,699 in ‘farm subsidies’ in 2016. These are very powerful people at the centre of the British establishment and their lobbying is very effective. For further information visit:
https://whoownsengland.org/2018/08/12/revealed-the-aristocrats-and-city-bankers-who-own-englands-grouse-moors/
Other useful sources:
https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/5369/1/289549.pdf
https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/2637/1/Huggins_SportAndTheBritishUpperClasses.pdf