The National Trust Year

It’s been a year when the National Trust has been carving up the Dark Peak uplands and imposing its agenda via cunningly contrived consultation strategies. This has happened not just on the Sheffield Moors but also on the High Peak moors. Their plan has been one of management and more management leading to a future of landscape control in which the exploitation will be little different to that which led to the monotony we see today. We can be fairly sure that section of the  upland countryside not in private hands will hardly vary from that ruined by economic and self serving interests over hundreds of years.

Simultaneously with the Sheffield Moors consultation (so called) the NT ran another on the High Peak moors. That one obviously influenced the other and the impossibility of ordinary people being involved to any meaningful extent in both meant that the industry view would inevitably predominate bringing just the subsidies and jobs that help careers to thrive beside which landscape and wildlife come a very poor second and third. They have been keen to demonstrate that there has been a debate yet all has been so skewed that those who contribute most, the urban and suburban population have been kept largely ignorant of the issues and even the process. And the result will be more of the same over-controlled countryside. However many times they use the word iconic to describe the Bleaklow vista I can see it only as somehow mirroring the slag heaps of a coalfield and symbolic of a comparable exploitation. Why we would want to keep the one while being anxious to remove the other I struggle to understand. 

So 2012 has shown the NT as leading the anti-nature and pro-exploiting agenda in the Peak District uplands. They justify their approach by rationalising the grim abuse as cultural or historic, therefoire needing to be conserved, while knowing well that these words can be applied to any period of history or any human activity. Why should this be returned to 1870 rather than 870 or 8700 BC? Or better still leave it for nature.  After all nobody lives there. They make the choice and there’s no doubt it’s for reasons of building empires and raking in subsidies. I sometimes think it would be no worse than having Bleaklow covered with wind turbines and pylons. Predictably the NT is protesting against wind turbines and pylons across Wales and its Chair, Sir Simon Jenkins has spoken out, as one expects him to. Though I’m not sure he was Chair at the time when the NT’s then Peak District property manager Mike Innerdale wanted to put a wind turbine at Longshaw and the PDNPA wouldn’t let him. It’s possible that Innerdale is not a great supporter of attractive landscapes especially more natural ones, given his work in the High Peak area around Bleaklow. Anyone who can have such a warped aesthetic as to think Bleaklow should be restored as a grouse moor must be viewed with suspicion surely? A few million native trees would be public money well spent, now we're to lose so many ash trees, instead of creating something for the shooting lobby to salivate over? The bare moors obsession is one of the most perverse ways of spending public money that even land managers can have dreamed up; but then it’s good for jobs, managers jobs. And there’s a bonus: once you discover the public is stupid enough to allow it to happen with its own money you realise there’s no end to the kind of self serving nonsense you can get away with. One of the odd perspectives that’s thrown up is the uneasy alliance between the subsidy loving conservationists and the normally anti-tax paying lobby among the wealthy classes who value grouse so they can have something to shoot. Perhaps that’s the secret of the scam: neutralise your likeliest opponent by drip feeding them what they want. 

The National Trust's chair Sir Simon, is an interesting case. It would be instructive to hear him justifying what is happening in the Dark Peak. He is possibly the most articulate and elegant of journalists with an enviable ability to illuminate current events with a new perspective yet also staggeringly prolific. Having been editor of The Times and London Evening Standard and written regular columns for both papers he's now firmly established at The Guardian. I recently found an article of his written for The Times in 2005 headed "....Finally We Have Licence to go Wild in the Country."

In this he welcomed the end of the farm subsidy arrangement in the CAP whereby farmers were paid for the amount they produced and looked forward to more beauty in the countryside including rewilding. The article is in The Times archive needing a subscription but it can be accessed here.

There's food for thought throughout but I'll quote the ending:

Yet the more I read about this dawn the more I sense something missing. The new countryside is being designed by English Nature, the Countryside Commission and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, by botanists, ecologists and soil scientists. Nobody has asked me what sort of countryside I want to spend £3 billion a year protecting. Nobody has asked the millions of mostly urban Britons who have spent huge sums to support farming in the past and must continue paying such sums in the future. Their wishes are taking for granted.
They may want a more sensitive ecology, but I believe they want more for their money than this micro-regulation. I do not care about fallen trees. I am happy to see sheep pasture return to scrub, plantations fill with undergrowth and moorland run wild with gorse, heather and bracken. I know the “rewilding” of Britain requires intervention, but wild is the direction in which it should go. This involves far more than species protection. It means a care for horizons, views and coastlines. It involves the elimination of ugly farm buildings, power lines, masts, turbines and defunct warehouses. It means treating the landscape, and the farms to protect it, as an aesthetic as well as a scientific reality.
There is none of this in the new policy because Britain has no lobby for beauty. Any fool can save a sedge but it takes a genius to save a scene. Yet it is Britain’s scenery which, in truth, we are now all paying to protect. We need the courage of this revolution, to think big as well as small.

There's quite a bit I would agree with there.

But where does he stand on grouse moors and the insistence on management even of the wildlife itself so that only those creatures that serve the interests of the landowners are allowed to live freely? As Chair of the National Trust I think he has a duty to tell us.