Upland Farming

Moorland Near Crisis

Written by Ian Mercer

Since the Mesolithics began woodland clearance, Neolithics accelerated the process and Bronze Age farmers took it to its lower topographic limits, at the valley lip of all the gorges, Dartmoor moorland has been sustained by the grazing and burning practices inherent in the south western hill-farming system. The qualities of that moorland which matter to all of us we only began to appreciate properly, if earlier writers are to be believed, in the nineteenth century. 

They are essentially in two contrasted groups. First, a wide open space, with long views punctuated by rocky structures natural and man made, a real temptation to walk and ride onwards. But as we shorten the gaze a splendid mosaic of plant communities is revealed, in its optimum state less than knee height. Beautiful to the observer but not impeding his or her progress. It does range however, with its underlying soils, from very dry, where bracken and European gorse may slow one’s pace, to extreme wetness, the latter as blanket bog or valley mire demanding navigational care. The great sweep of the ‘people–friendly’ Moor lies between these two extremes or did until we (corporately) began, very recently, to intervene in the hill-farmer’s regime in the apparent interests of biodiverse ‘favourable condition’ and its ‘recovery’.