Site of Scandalous Rip-Off?

There are people around who make the sign of the cross each time they sneeze.  There are those who  stand up and take off their hats when someone mentions the royal family. And there are those who make suitable and reverential obeisance when the letters SSSI are mentioned.

Join up the white spots to see where farm vehicles have been routinely compacting the land,

Those of us who've had dealings with the local branch of Natural England will no longer be surprised at the disfunctional rationale for determining protection status of land areas. As Mark has said, some office boy just drew a line on a map. This 100 plus acres is a Site of Special Scientific Interest. All I can say is thank God they didn't know about the outside loo at the end of my granny's garden, the one just next to the train line to Birmingham. They would have clapped a Special Protection Area Status on it.

Site of Singularly Stultifying Insignificance could be one definition but I'm open to others. I'm convinced no other country in the world could deceive itself into glorifying a stretch of agricultural land like this, constantly punished and exploited as something of such scientific value that it has to be preserved.

The land brings in money for the managers if you identify it as SSSI and that starts in this case at £26,000 but there will be other amounts. In order to qualify for this Higher Level Stewardship dosh you have to get a FEP done, that's a farm environment plan. It's usually done by an independent surveyor according to Natural England's website. In this case though, SWT did it themselves. Hmm. Now you would hardly be so foolish as to claim it had negligible wildlife value in their situation would you? As it is there was an Ecological Survey done by an "assistant ecologist/volunteer" attached to SWT. It states that the grassland is 'species poor' but does identify Adders Tongue in one part.

All in all I stick to my view that this place could do with some real nature and real wilding to get it to be more interesting.

A start could be made by learning something from this: