WILD FELL: Fighting for Nature on a Lake District hill farm
Lee Schofield
Penguin, London, 2022, 338 Pages
Hardback: £15.99 | ISBN 9780857527752
Review by Peter Taylor
Occasionally, very occasionally, a book comes along that restores faith – in good writing, good natural history, that counters some of my growing despair, teaches things I did not know and in this case, dispels a long-held prejudice. The old prejudice relates to the RSPB. Lee Schofield was put in charge of an RSPB purchase of a hill-farm tenancy in Haweswater, the former home of England’s only nesting pair of golden eagles. His task was to make hill farming nature-friendly.
I have judged the RSPB for turning Nature into a corporate business empire. When they bought prime habitat, such as the secretive gem that was Leighton Moss, it was quickly developed into a birding mecca, with trails, hides, interpretation boards, car-park and visitor centre replete with an arcade of mugs and tea-towels. As a boy, I spent hours dodging the old game keepers there and creeping through the reed-beds to catch sight of a roosting spoonbill, or get close to a reeling grasshopper warbler.
My youth was full of such magic – clouds of butterflies and flocks of finches, catching lizards and snakes on the way home from school – and Schofield shares that same heritage, now all gone thanks to modern intensive farming. I joined the RSPB as a young teenager, and was a member until I could bear it no longer. My prejudice grew during the ‘Wildland Network’ years pioneered by BANC and ECOS. We seldom managed to get the RSPB involved. They always did their own thing. If Lee Schofield is representative of the modern RSPB, then I must totally revise that jaundiced view.
The first thing that stands out in this book is his knowledge of (and love for) plants – ferns, mosses, lichens, trees, even grasses, and above all, flowers; but more, how floral diversity in the uplands is the key, first to insect diversity and then to avian diversity. Get the plants right and everything else follows, all the way up to the eagles.
How to do that with farming in the Lake District – famous as it is for its ‘sheep-wrecked’ barren fells proudly supporting a chocolate box Beatrix Potter world, worth a thousand million in tourist dollars? I have direct experience in Wales of hill-farmers and their limitations regarding the embrace of a wilder plant-rich fell. The RSPB job was close to a poisoned chalice, and the author frankly admits, being the shy and retiring type, that it had many nightmare moments. For me, this is one of the beauties of the book – the personal and political, the emotional toil, and the joys of breakthrough he charts, however limited.
Rewilding had already gained bad press amongst farmers by the time Schofield took up the job. There were plenty of extremist tracts promising blanket wildland – ultimately with wolves, and the end of subsidised hill farms. Farmers closed ranks to challenge those views. Schofield had to field the brunt of that backlash, within the relatively closed community he had moved to with his young family.
Despite his self-admitted limitations, the book describes how he perseveres – cutting sheep numbers on the common-land, at times restricting the breeding ewes to the in-bye pastures to let the fell rejuvenate and connecting “the shattered fragments longing to recover”. He goes walk-about to learn from other projects, for example, of belted Galloway cattle in the forest at Ennerdale; to Norway to see how sheep-farming copes with a much wilder fell; and to Gran Paradiso to witness the Alpine meadows ablaze in a glory of flowering plants yet supporting a strong shepherding tradition. And, confidence restored, he returns to the up-mountain task of talking to his neighbours.
Is there evidence of success? I was given hope, where I had none. But there is a telling statistic. The RSPB Haweswater farm of 3,000 ha (including commons), held at first 1,500 breeding ewes and made an annual loss of £162,000. Its animal-derived income was £55,000 which cost £217,000 to produce. It received £300,000 in government grants. The project aims to run without cost to the RSPB, including paying the staff (a small community aided by volunteers) and rent to United Utilities, thus providing a model for other farms. The problem was that even at a lower level of grazing, the longed-for improvements on the fell were marginal.
The project took a leap of faith – to reduce sheep numbers and replace them with cattle and ponies, thus diversifying the grazing regime. At first, these changes were intensely unpopular among the wider community, but there is a slowly dawning realisation that undertaking landscape restoration for public goods such as water quality, flood amelioration and carbon sequestration, as well as the wildlife benefits, is also farming, and deserving of widespread public support at a time when, post-Brexit, agricultural subsidies are under growing scrutiny.
Often, the success of visionary projects falls to the qualities of a local champion – and here, the RSPB have been well served by the pioneering Lee Schofield, as, I would proffer, have we all.