This is Piles Copse, the largest remaining fragment of high-ground temperate rainforest on Dartmoor. It’s a tiny speck of green in a dismal, human-made desert. Prepare yourselves for a story of breath-taking perversity.
Even in fairly recent history, it used to be much bigger, to judge by two lines of evidence: a few surviving oaks scattered beyond the current woodland edge, and bluebells and bracken, often seen as indicators of recently-forested land.
In the absence of human intervention, much of the high ground on Dartmoor would likely be covered by temperate rainforest, to judge by hygrothermal mapping, conducted here by Guy Shrubsole’s excellent initiative, The Lost Rainforests of Britain.
So why is rainforest on high Dartmoor confined to a few tiny pockets, of which this fragment is the largest? Sheep. Sheep selectively browse out tree seedlings, which are highly nutritious. So when the old trees die, there’s nothing to replace them. You can see the results inside Piles Copse.
There’s no “recuitment”, ie new trees, at all. The woodland floor has been completely cleared of saplings. As the old trees die, the copse continues to retreat.
Hang on a moment. Isn’t Piles Copse meant to be protected? The display boards tell us, “It is protected by law as a Site of Scientific interest (SSSI). It’s home to a unique collection of bryophytes (mosses and liverworts) and other epiphytes (non-parasitic plants that grow on trees).”
The boards, erected by Dartmoor National Park, also provide a list of things that are not allowed in Piles Copse. Quite right too, given that it’s a tiny remant of an extremely rare habitat. But strangely they don’t exclude the thing that’s destroying the rainforest. Sheep.
I’m not saying the authorities do nothing. There are some small “exclosures” in the wood, fences excluding sheep. Just look at the difference on either side of the fence line. Within the exclosure, lots of young trees. Outside, none.
There are also a handful of expensive-looking tree-guards erected around a seedling or two in the rest of the wood, to stop the sheep from getting to them. Otherwise, Piles Copse has been hollowed out and left to die. Call it Piles Corpse.
Not all the guards succeed. Especially if they’ve left a gap big enough for a sheep to get its snout in.
We’re paying twice for this madness. There would be no sheep on the moor if it were not for lavish subsidies, as they are highly unproductive and loss-making. Our taxes pay both for the ecological destruction and for the feeble remedy. Round and round the money goes. Pop goes the ecosystem.
As if the impacts of grazing weren’t bad enough, they are supplemented on the moor by “swaling”: the burning of recovering woodland, to expand the area of grazing for sheep. Not only is this – astonishingly – legal, it’s actually celebrated by Dartmoor National Park Authority.
It claims that swaling (burning) “helps manage vegetation on overgrown heathland and clears the ground of dead vegetation so that new growth can appear.” Not a word of that makes ecological sense. www.dartmoor.gov.uk
It also claims this burning makes the land less prone to wildfires. Yes, as an ecosystem tries to return to woodland, its intermediate successional stages can be fire-prone. But well-established woodland is very hard to burn. Swaling, by interrupting the succession, keeps the land flammable.
Many areas that might otherwise have supported rainforest have been pushed so hard for so long, through grazing and swaling, that they seem to have crossed a tipping point, into a new equilibrium state: Molinia monoculture. Dismal, almost impassable, harbours scarcely any other lifeforms.
Molinia, or purple moor grass, loves ecological destruction. It swarms into the vacuum. If you push the system far enough, it takes over across a vast area, creating what is, in effect, a terrestrial dead zone: almost nothing else can live there. Dead zones now cover much of Dartmoor.
Once the ecosystem has flipped into Molinia desert, sheep won’t go there: it’s among the few species they don’t eat. This has caused a great display of head-scratching, even among ecologists. How come the ecosystem doesn’t recover once grazing stops? The likely answer is hysteresis.
In systems theory, hysteresis means that once a system has flipped into a new stable state, with its own self-reinforcing properties, far more energy is needed to reverse the flip than was required to cause it. It’s easy to fall off a cliff, much harder to climb back up.
Molinia is highly fire-prone, as we saw last week, when a wildfire consumed 500 hectares of moor. But it doesn’t seem to mind being burnt. It bounces back happier than ever.
Yet on we go, with continued grazing and burning pressure pushing, pushing, pushing Dartmoor’s remaining ecosystems towards Molinia desert. And all subsidised by you and me, the taxpayers. What explains this perversity? Power.
Power on Dartmoor is highly concentrated in surprising hands. Commoners. In most places, a commons is a distributive, democratic system. Here it’s the opposite: a small group of people exerting near-total control over vast areas. The “commoners”, lavishly funded by us, are more like aristocrats.
The commoners’ answer to everything is grazing. Too much grazing? What’s needed is more grazing. Wildfires? Aha, not enough grazing! Nuclear proliferation? Probably grazing. They endlessly rail against “under-grazing”. Their prescription is scarcely challenged.
How can a British ecosystem be “under-grazed” by an invasive ruminant from Mesopotamia? Can our wildlife be under-hunted by American mink? Could our verges be under-infested by Japanese knotweed? Are our woods underoccupied by grey squirrels?
Now it’s true that one possible way of suppressing Molinia is by running cattle on it over the course of one winter, so that their trampling breaks up the sward. But unless this is a deliberate step towards the restoration of either rainforest or blanket bog, it will solve nothing.
Needless to say, that’s not what the Commoner-Kings want. They want to restore sheep grazing, which will take us straight back, with the help of even more lashings of public money, to Molinia desert.
The thing about power is that, in the absence of effective challenge, it becomes hegemonic. Almost everyone adopts the worldview of the powerful. Dartmoor National Park channels commoner power and commoner beliefs, as we’ve already seen. But the same applies to some conservationists.
27. While well-meaning, even they recite the “under-grazing” myth. They call for replacing one fire-prone disasterscape with another. If they saw this grazing and burning cataclysm in Brazil, they’d know it for what it is. But here the blinkers are on. foundationforcommonland.org.uk
A desirable ecological state is something we need to choose and work towards. In my view, it’s a National Park rich in functioning ecosystems – on high ground, mostly rainforest and blanket bog. That means stopping grazing on most of the moor, rewetting, planting and natural regeneration.
We are paying for this catastrophe. We should decide how our money is spent: no taxation without representation! Especially in a national park. Public money should buy public goods. At the moment it buys an ecological disaster. Enough already.
Reproduced from a BlueSky thread by kind permission.
