James Fenton
It is high summer and the heather moors are coming into bloom, turning into
that glorious purple which was at one time the symbol of the Scottish
Highlands.
Not so long ago the open heather moors were seen as one of the country’s
main tourist attractions. In my youth it was common to see visitors
returning to England with a sprig of heather attached to the bonnet of
their car, but this is a rare sight now, if seen at all.
The moors are still celebrated by some, particularly now that the Glorious
Twelfth is upon us, the date when the grouse shooting season opens and
there is a race to get the first bird to London restaurants. For red grouse
are intimately linked to heather; it is their home, and their fate and the
fate of the heather are inextricably entwined.
Beyond the sporting fraternity, however, heather moorland is no longer the
potent symbol of the Highlands it once was. On the VisitScotland website,
you will be hard put to find any pictures of heather moor or, in the Nature
& Geography section, any mention of “moorland” or “heather” in the text.
The absence of any reference to moorland is mirrored in the Cairngorms
National Park section. It is as if moorland were slowly being made
invisible. And in truth, this most iconic of Scottish terrain is being
steadily eroded to make way for forestry, wind farms, hydro-electric
schemes and mile upon mile of access tracks. Why is there no widespread
outcry at this loss? Why is there no NGO dedicated to preserving moorland,
as there is for every other habitat or species?
Perhaps one reason for the lack of concern is precisely because the land
concerned is often grouse moor or deer estate, symbolic of the exclusive
use of the land for the aristocracy. Open moorland has become associated
politically with the landowning lobby: it is derided because of its
association. And the association is strong. Since the decline of the clan
system, landowners have been widely accused of clearing people off the land
to make way at first for sheep and later for deer.
And it is true that they preferred to have exclusive use of the land,
“their land” as they saw it, for their own recreational ends: there are
many stories of walkers being ordered off estates. This exclusiveness has
always rankled, so that on the return of the Scottish Parliament after its
300-year absence one of its first acts was to bring in the Land Reform Act
of 2003, giving legal access to everyone. However, people still see the
moors as the preserve of the elite where deer stalking or grouse shooting
is something you do once you have become rich and joined “the
establishment”. The “Glorious Twelfth” is not glorious in everyone’s eyes.
Another possible reason for our apparent indifference is that killing wild
animals for sport is frowned on by many people, so that the moors are
associated with the recreational killing of deer and the slaughter of
grouse. But if, from the conservationist’s perspective, there are too many
deer, does it really matter whether the deer are killed by someone who is
paid a salary to kill them or by someone who pays a fee to kill them?
Although I do not shoot myself, I do eat meat, including venison and
grouse, and I would prefer that my food had come from a clean kill on the
open hill than from a wild animal farmed for eventual slaughter.
Whatever one thinks about field sports, we should value the terrain on
which they are conducted – and celebrate the fact that while the landscape
abides as a habitat for the red grouse, so a part of our indigenous open
moorland – which has an unbroken ecological link back to the last ice age,
and whose vegetation retains one of the most natural patterns in Europe –
is preserved. “Naturalness” is a key determinant of global nature
conservation value and, just as we all want to keep as much of the
Brazilian rainforest as possible, we should be protective of our own
rainforest equivalent – Scotland’s indigenous moorland. Owing to the high
organic content of its soils and peat, this treeless expanse stores at
least as much carbon as a forest, and often a lot more – and hence is
important in consideration of climate change.
By moorland I mean any area of unwooded ground dominated by indigenous
heaths, bogs and grassland. Because Scotland’s rocks are hard and acidic,
our soils waterlogged and infertile, and our climate cool and damp, trees
are discouraged and our native heathers, sedges and grasses take over.
These moors are the tracts of open ground that we see when we drive south
over the hills to Moffat or through the Dalveen Pass to Thornhill, when we
drive north to Glencoe over Rannoch Moor and onwards through Glen Shiel to
Skye, or to Inverness via the wilds of Drumochter Pass. They are the vast
boggy lands of Caithness and the Western Isles, the rugged landscapes of
Sutherland and Wester Ross and also, far to the south, of the Galloway
Hills; they are the gentler heather moors of the Cairngorms and the Angus
Glens, and the grassy moors of Argyll and the Southern Uplands.
Scotland is a world centre for such temperate moorland, and for plants such
as heather, cross-leaved heath and bog asphodel that grow there. Many birds
– such as golden eagles, hen harriers, dunlin, curlew and redshank, as well
as the red grouse, also depend on these open, tundra-like landscapes.
In the past, moorland landscapes were so common that Scots probably took
them for granted. Recent research has shown, for example, that at the time
of the battle of Bannockburn, whose 700th anniversary was marked earlier
this year, the landscape around Stirling was virtually treeless and
therefore, presumably, dominated by moorland. But nowadays it can be hard
to envisage what the Scottish landscape was like before the great estates
started planting trees in the 18th century, before the Forestry Commission
was formed in the 20th, and before agricultural improvement removed the
last of the moorland from the lowlands.
Today, moorland has retreated almost completely from the lowlands, with
places such as Fenwick Moor above Glasgow, Auchencorth Moss south of
Edinburgh and Flanders Moss near Stirling being but relicts of their former
selves. Often the memory of this moorland lingers only in place names,
particularly those containing the words “moss” or “muir”. And in the
uplands, particularly during the second half of the 20th century, great
tracts have been lost, either converted to forestry plantations or
reclaimed for agriculture. Still, the erosion continues. The Scottish
Forestry Strategy has a government commitment to plant 10,000 hectares of
trees a year. Then there is the industrial development of windfarms,
hydro-electric schemes and access tracks. In the lowlands, often the last
bits of remaining moorland are the rough hilltop grazings, which are too
exposed for conversion to farmland. But these areas are also the windiest
locations and the places with least economic constraints – hence the
obvious place to build windfarms (and also telecommunication masts). The
sad thing is that for most people, this means that the only remaining
places where they can experience a bit of wild nature in their locality are
under threat.
But of course windfarms are being built on moors everywhere in Scotland,
particularly in the Southern Uplands and in areas of the Highlands where
the national grid is nearby. I sometimes think it would be better to have
two new nuclear power stations producing enough electricity full-time for
the whole of Scotland than to industrialise all our moors in order to
squeeze out every last kilowatt of power from the wind or water. There is a
danger of us losing our wildness completely from the cumulative impact of
windfarm after windfarm. Would we want to live in a country without wild
places?
Nowadays, land is expected to earn its keep, to be useful. In these
mercenary times, it appears we cannot afford the land just “to be”. And as
a consequence, we are losing the “old Scotland”. Those moorland landscapes
contributed to the Scots being the people that they are, and helped shape
our culture and mindset. That culture is being replaced by what I see as an
alien, imported one from the south (and Scandinavia), a culture of trees
and woodland. And in the process, we are losing our last remaining areas of
untamed wildness, which were once so much a characteristic of Scotland. If
the trend of moorland loss continues, we will nowhere be able to remember
what nature was like in the raw. We are also losing the habitats, plants
and animals that are among Scotland’s main contributions to global
biodiversity.
One reason for this indifference towards moorland can be traced back to
ecologists such as Frank Fraser Darling, who described the Highlands as a
landscape degraded by centuries of deforestation. Construing moorland as a
consequence of human destruction creates a kind of moral imperative to “put
trees back” into the landscape. One famous Scottish conservationist has
even referred to heather as a “weed”.
Even organisations devoted to conserving Scotland’s wild places, such as
the John Muir Trust and the Scottish Wild Land Group, are keen to keep
covering the moors with trees. This tendency has also been taken up by some
landowners such as the Danish billionaire Anders Povlsen who, in addition
to Glen Feshie, has bought two moorland estates in Sutherland to fulfil his
vision of “restoring” the ecology of the area by creating large areas of
new native woodland.
I think we are being brainwashed through a potent mix of ecology and
politics, that there is a subliminal message of woodland “good”, moorland
“bad”. Looking after moorland is seen as a top-down activity preserving a
degraded landscape for an elite, whereas woodland creation is a bottom-up,
community activity restoring a degraded landscape for the many. For, unlike
grouse shooting, woodland creation is widely promoted as a community
activity by the likes of Reforesting Scotland, Trees For Life and the Royal
Society for the Protection of Birds.
We are making a mistake. Moorland is not merely degraded woodland but an
important natural habitat, one that distinguishes Scotland from the uplands
of mainland Europe. Nor should it be damned by its association with field
sports and the landed gentry. We need to put politics aside, and separate
the activities that take place on the land from the land itself.
No one should underestimate how much we stand to lose. Have you ever walked
the moors with a wet west wind blowing cold against your cheeks? Or run
downhill through deep, sunlit heather? Or surprised red grouse and watched
the covey fly away downwind, crekking, while, in turn, mountain hares are
watching you, trying to calculate your every move? Have you ever admired
the bog cotton, brighter even than snow?
Anyone who has spent time in these places could not contemplate the loss of
those bleak, windy, windswept, midge-ridden, rough, boggy, and yet glorious
moors. Who would want to replace the call of the whaup, the crek of the
grouse, the pip-pip of the pipit, the beauty of parnassus, the orange glow
of the asphodel, the blue of the milkwort, the smell of the myrtle and of
heather in bloom, the black of the peat hag, the white of the bog wood?
Moorland is at the heart of Scotland, and it needs to be preserved for
future generations. In this respect, Scottish Natural Heritage’s new map of
wild land is a good start because most of the areas identified consist
mainly of moorland: we should use this map to prevent further encroachment
of windfarms, hydro schemes, new woods and tracks in these locations.
However, there is a lot of moorland outwith these areas, and we also need a
comprehensive moorland strategy for Scotland – on a par with the forestry
strategy that already exists – in order to identify the key moors we want
to retain, and the steps needed to protect them.
Dr James HC Fenton is an ecologist and conservationist who formerly worked
for the National Trust for Scotland and Scottish Natural Heritage
0 Comments