(^100) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
was ever dreamed of a few years ago’.^39 Typical was the transformation of
Whinfell in Cumberland after its enclosure in 1826, where John Nicholson
obtained a compact allotment of upland moor, rising to 385 metres above
sea level, which he surrounded and subdivided with drystone walls, and
built a new farmstead called ‘Hatteringill’. Stones were cleared, the moors
pared and burnt, then harrowed and sown.^40 In such locations, more than
anywhere else, ambitious schemes of reclamation were often fuelled mainly
by a fashionable enthusiasm for improvement, and many were abandoned
as prices fell back either at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, or later in the
century.
The more permanent improvements made to the lower moors must
have had a serious impact on wildlife. Even where the new fields were only
converted to improved pasture the loss of heather, the dominant vegetation,
would have led to a reduction in the numbers of characteristic upland birds:
the golden plover, the red and black grouse, the hen harrier, the dunlin and
the short-eared owl.^41 Improvements in drainage would have had a similar
impact on birds like the lapwing, snipe and redshank. Even where moors
survived enclosure and improvement, moreover, their character often
changed. This was because the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
saw higher stocking levels in upland areas, for larger numbers of animals
could now be over-wintered on fodder grown on lower ground; there was
also an increasing emphasis, from the early eighteenth century, on sheep
rather than on cattle, in part due to changes in the agriculture of lowland
areas. Sheep tend to be selective grazers and, at high densities, suppress the
growth of the more palatable plants and grasses, and of heather, leading
to the development of a more uniform, species-poor acidic grassland
characterized by Nardus stricta, Molinia caerula and reeds.^42 The decline in
cattle may also have begun the spread of bracken across the uplands, which
was to accelerate further from the later nineteenth century.^43
In some areas, however, heather moors survived in a more robust
condition. Landowners often favoured enclosure to allow for the protection,
and more intensive management, of grouse. Here heather, the principal
habitat for the grouse, was carefully nurtured, although as we shall see
game keepers often waged a vicious war on other forms of wildlife. Large
areas of ‘waste’ also survived in other contexts. There were very significant
reductions in the area of grass heath, and of chalk grassland in the east of
England – especially on the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wolds. But on the
chalklands of the south many parishes still had 30 per cent, and some over
50 per cent, of their area under pasture in the 1830s.^44 The lower slopes were
often brought under the plough but the higher downs were ‘near the margin
of profitable arable cultivation’.^45 The poorer heaths likewise often survived,
in part because the deep sandy soils would never repay profitable cultivation
and in part because extensive areas of grazing had to be maintained in order
to keep the particularly large numbers of sheep which were needed to coax a
elle
(Elle)
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