Heathland rescue
A buzzard cruises high above the truck stops at the junction of the A49 and A41 south of Whitchurch in north Shropshire. It veers over the massive grain-storage hangars and out across Prees Heath Common, following a line of birch trees growing on the remains of a runway where Second World War bombers once took off in the same direction. From that height, the buzzard can see all that remains of the great Prees Heath, which once stretched for kilometres, but is now little more than a heathery 60-hectare triangle sitting between two busy trunk roads and surrounded by a sea of maize and barley.
‘Butterfly Conservation bought the common [in 2006] after a 20-year campaign to save it from gravel extraction because it’s the last site in the Midlands for the silver-studded blue butterfly,’ says the heath’s warden, Stephen Lewis. ‘Less than ten per cent of the 60 hectares is relatively undisturbed heath of common heather, bell heather, gorse, broom and fine grasses.’
The rest of the site is being restored from agriculture by turning the fertiliser-polluted soil over with metre-deep ploughing, removing scrub and seeding heather from other heaths in the region. ‘We can replace the old heath with something similar but not identical [to its original state],’ Lewis explains. ‘Conservation is the prime driver of this project, and all our work is linked to the UK BAP [Biodiversity Action Plan] for the silver-studded blue butterfly; it’s a flagship species and we’ll do everything we can for it.’
Fragmented landscape
Prees Heath Common is fairly typical of much of Britain’s heathland: a fragment of the 16 per cent of this iconic landscape that survived from the 19th century to the end of the 20th. Heaths were shaped by a way of life that has largely vanished, and some of our most cherished wildlife vanished with it.
‘There are 133 UK BAP species (species of particular biodiversity importance) that are associated with heathland, but only nine per cent of them actually need heather,’ says Isabel Alonso, heathland specialist for Natural England. ‘Most of them just need the open structure. Lizards, for instance, need bare ground to warm up or cool down. Heathland species require a particular structural diversity that, when we cut trees down to restore, many people think is “unnatural”.’
Heaths were often decried as venues for unnatural practices. Dwellers in these ancient places of mystery were once called heathens, a fact that has no doubt contributed to heaths’ disreputable character. One with a controversial past is Greenham Common in Berkshire, once a base for US B52 nuclear bombers, but now a stronghold of the beautiful Dartford warbler. ‘The social history of heathland is intrinsic to their restoration,’ says Jacky Akam of the Berkshire Buckinghamshire Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust (BBOWT), which manages the restoration of 500 hectares of Greenham and Cookham heaths.
‘From a human perspective, heathlands are more difficult to understand in terms of biodiversity than ancient woodland. The push to plant trees for the environment fired up an enthusiasm for them, and so it’s understandable that people get upset when we cut them down to restore heathland. The challenge is to help people learn about biodiversity in a place that looks barren.’
For most people, the social connection with heaths disappeared long ago and has been replaced by an aesthetic. It’s the wild, weird openness that gives the heath its special character.
From South African fynbos to Californian chaparral, heathlands are largely open ecosystems of dwarf shrub vegetation on free-draining soils. In the UK, which holds most of Europe’s surviving examples, heaths are anthropogenic: short, ericaceous, heather-dominated vegetation that has been maintained by swailing (clearing woodland, burning and grazing) since about 6000 BC.
By the 18th century, the great expanses of open heath of the British lowlands were accused of being uncultivated, uncivilised wastelands – outlaw country. William Cobbett, political commentator and countryside explorer, detested the ‘rascally heaths’ near Marlborough, and no doubt he would have approved of the devastation wreaked on heathlands around the nation by a combination of urban expansion and the agricultural revolution.
Traditional practices
Most British heathland is common land – privately owned, but with others having certain traditional rights to use it in specified ways, such as grazing livestock, gathering firewood or turbary (digging turf or peat for fuel). The application of these traditional practices – through such factors as the control of the number of grazing animals, the frequency of burning to restore heather and grass, refraining from ploughing and fencing – maintained a landscape that supported the people’s rights and, indirectly, the associated wildlife. ‘Our commons,’ wrote the 19th-century poet John Clare, are ‘left free in the rude rags of nature’. Not any more they’re not.
During the 20th century, the social changes that affected common land practice and the pressure on ‘wastes’ to be productive led to the widespread erosion of wild habitats. Encroachment by agriculture, housing development and conifer plantations eventually destroyed 84 per cent of the remaining lowland heath.
In 1997, the Tomorrow’s Heathland Heritage programme, one of the first major habitat-restoration schemes supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, was set up to reverse heathland loss. Run by Natural England (or English Nature, as it was then known), it had restored 42,000 hectares of lowland heath around the UK by the time it finished last year. Around that time, the Forestry Commission announced that it would be clearing conifers from heathland in England – which holds two thirds of all UK heathlands – at a rate of 1,000 hectares per year, in the hope of restoring a further 30,000 hectares.
This will create larger blocks of landscape and help con-nect up habitats: great news for species such as the nightjar, wood lark, smooth snake, ladybird spider and marsh gentian, all of which are currently trapped in conservation ghettos of fragmented heathland nature reserves. The initiative has encouraged the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to reintroduce the field cricket – a flightless chirruper of sandy heaths described as ‘abundant’ by Gilbert White in 1761 but almost extinct by 1990 – to restored Farnham Heath in Surrey and Pulborough Brooks in West Sussex.
But the world has changed radically in recent years, and even as it’s being restored, Britain’s heathlands face other threats. According to Alonso, these include nitrogen from agricultural fertilisers and traffic emissions, which favours grasses, which, in turn, out-compete heather; the warmer summers being brought on by climate change, which see plants growing more rapidly, creating more biomass and so requiring more management resources to keep the habitats open; and continued loss to agriculture and urban sprawl.
A holistic approach
Increasingly, heathlands are owned and managed by conservation organisations that are trying to tackle these problems, revive the commons system for grazing management, and look at the potential uses of biomass from bracken, scrub and the like.
‘Politicians now understand the broader ecosystems case that we need to operate on a larger, landscape scale to conserve water, alleviate flooding and sequester carbon,’ says Paul Wilkinson, head of Living Landscapes at the Wildlife Trusts. ‘Natural processes have an economy of scale, and by working at the landscape scale, we can enable these smaller fragments to be more economically viable.’
Jacky Akam of BBOWT believes that the aim of heathland restoration projects is ‘to adopt a more holistic approach than in the past. But I can’t see a time when the [legal] protection, designation and planning isn’t needed to protect them from development.’
Isabel Alonso of Natural England is more optimistic. She believes that people’s love of heathland will sustain them. ‘When heathland restoration has trouble from people who don’t like felling trees or grazing livestock, it’s not because they don’t value the place, it’s because they don’t understand its natural and social history,’ she says. ‘The nightjars are spectacular, and if we manage their sites, we will keep them; if not, they’ll disappear. Talking about ecosystem services is showing these places have more value, and biodiversity will bring benefits to people. They value them so much that they won’t let them disappear.’
Understanding ecology
At Prees Heath Common, hemmed in by thundering trunk roads and a grubby prairie of arable agriculture, colonies of black ants that live under lumps of concrete left from the Second World War runway carry on a scurrilous affair with the silver-studded blue butterflies. The ants farm or manage the butterflies from egg through to adult, attending their feeding on heather, milking the caterpillars for their sweet honeydew and harbouring the pupae in their nests before escorting the butterflies to take off like ground crew. It’s a protection racket and a symbiotic relationship that, in order to be sustained, requires a careful understanding of the whole heath’s entire ecology.
While Stephen Lewis, the warden for Butterfly Conservation, was explaining this to me, in between chatting to dog-walkers, a couple of men who may have been travellers prospecting for a pitch pulled up in a flatbed truck. Lewis’s movement between these very different situations seemed indicative of the everyday issues that face heathlands, and also a reminder that they still exist at the margins of things.
With their wild, open landscapes made more mysterious by the secret life going on in them, and their history as the dwelling places of an ancient but marginalised society, heaths are the rough-and-ready antidotes to over-managed countryside – the ‘rude rags of Nature,’ as John Clare put it. As conservationists struggle with a changing world to reclaim more heath, it’s not the land alone that matters. For heathland to stand a chance of a future, it’s those who dwell on them that count; heaths won’t be heaths without the return of the heathens.
November 2011
‘Butterfly Conservation bought the common [in 2006] after a 20-year campaign to save it from gravel extraction because it’s the last site in the Midlands for the silver-studded blue butterfly,’ says the heath’s warden, Stephen Lewis. ‘Less than ten per cent of the 60 hectares is relatively undisturbed heath of common heather, bell heather, gorse, broom and fine grasses.’
The rest of the site is being restored from agriculture by turning the fertiliser-polluted soil over with metre-deep ploughing, removing scrub and seeding heather from other heaths in the region. ‘We can replace the old heath with something similar but not identical [to its original state],’ Lewis explains. ‘Conservation is the prime driver of this project, and all our work is linked to the UK BAP [Biodiversity Action Plan] for the silver-studded blue butterfly; it’s a flagship species and we’ll do everything we can for it.’
Fragmented landscape
Prees Heath Common is fairly typical of much of Britain’s heathland: a fragment of the 16 per cent of this iconic landscape that survived from the 19th century to the end of the 20th. Heaths were shaped by a way of life that has largely vanished, and some of our most cherished wildlife vanished with it.
‘There are 133 UK BAP species (species of particular biodiversity importance) that are associated with heathland, but only nine per cent of them actually need heather,’ says Isabel Alonso, heathland specialist for Natural England. ‘Most of them just need the open structure. Lizards, for instance, need bare ground to warm up or cool down. Heathland species require a particular structural diversity that, when we cut trees down to restore, many people think is “unnatural”.’
Heaths were often decried as venues for unnatural practices. Dwellers in these ancient places of mystery were once called heathens, a fact that has no doubt contributed to heaths’ disreputable character. One with a controversial past is Greenham Common in Berkshire, once a base for US B52 nuclear bombers, but now a stronghold of the beautiful Dartford warbler. ‘The social history of heathland is intrinsic to their restoration,’ says Jacky Akam of the Berkshire Buckinghamshire Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust (BBOWT), which manages the restoration of 500 hectares of Greenham and Cookham heaths.
‘From a human perspective, heathlands are more difficult to understand in terms of biodiversity than ancient woodland. The push to plant trees for the environment fired up an enthusiasm for them, and so it’s understandable that people get upset when we cut them down to restore heathland. The challenge is to help people learn about biodiversity in a place that looks barren.’
For most people, the social connection with heaths disappeared long ago and has been replaced by an aesthetic. It’s the wild, weird openness that gives the heath its special character.
From South African fynbos to Californian chaparral, heathlands are largely open ecosystems of dwarf shrub vegetation on free-draining soils. In the UK, which holds most of Europe’s surviving examples, heaths are anthropogenic: short, ericaceous, heather-dominated vegetation that has been maintained by swailing (clearing woodland, burning and grazing) since about 6000 BC.
By the 18th century, the great expanses of open heath of the British lowlands were accused of being uncultivated, uncivilised wastelands – outlaw country. William Cobbett, political commentator and countryside explorer, detested the ‘rascally heaths’ near Marlborough, and no doubt he would have approved of the devastation wreaked on heathlands around the nation by a combination of urban expansion and the agricultural revolution.
Traditional practices
Most British heathland is common land – privately owned, but with others having certain traditional rights to use it in specified ways, such as grazing livestock, gathering firewood or turbary (digging turf or peat for fuel). The application of these traditional practices – through such factors as the control of the number of grazing animals, the frequency of burning to restore heather and grass, refraining from ploughing and fencing – maintained a landscape that supported the people’s rights and, indirectly, the associated wildlife. ‘Our commons,’ wrote the 19th-century poet John Clare, are ‘left free in the rude rags of nature’. Not any more they’re not.
During the 20th century, the social changes that affected common land practice and the pressure on ‘wastes’ to be productive led to the widespread erosion of wild habitats. Encroachment by agriculture, housing development and conifer plantations eventually destroyed 84 per cent of the remaining lowland heath.
In 1997, the Tomorrow’s Heathland Heritage programme, one of the first major habitat-restoration schemes supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, was set up to reverse heathland loss. Run by Natural England (or English Nature, as it was then known), it had restored 42,000 hectares of lowland heath around the UK by the time it finished last year. Around that time, the Forestry Commission announced that it would be clearing conifers from heathland in England – which holds two thirds of all UK heathlands – at a rate of 1,000 hectares per year, in the hope of restoring a further 30,000 hectares.
This will create larger blocks of landscape and help con-nect up habitats: great news for species such as the nightjar, wood lark, smooth snake, ladybird spider and marsh gentian, all of which are currently trapped in conservation ghettos of fragmented heathland nature reserves. The initiative has encouraged the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to reintroduce the field cricket – a flightless chirruper of sandy heaths described as ‘abundant’ by Gilbert White in 1761 but almost extinct by 1990 – to restored Farnham Heath in Surrey and Pulborough Brooks in West Sussex.
But the world has changed radically in recent years, and even as it’s being restored, Britain’s heathlands face other threats. According to Alonso, these include nitrogen from agricultural fertilisers and traffic emissions, which favours grasses, which, in turn, out-compete heather; the warmer summers being brought on by climate change, which see plants growing more rapidly, creating more biomass and so requiring more management resources to keep the habitats open; and continued loss to agriculture and urban sprawl.
A holistic approach
Increasingly, heathlands are owned and managed by conservation organisations that are trying to tackle these problems, revive the commons system for grazing management, and look at the potential uses of biomass from bracken, scrub and the like.
‘Politicians now understand the broader ecosystems case that we need to operate on a larger, landscape scale to conserve water, alleviate flooding and sequester carbon,’ says Paul Wilkinson, head of Living Landscapes at the Wildlife Trusts. ‘Natural processes have an economy of scale, and by working at the landscape scale, we can enable these smaller fragments to be more economically viable.’
Jacky Akam of BBOWT believes that the aim of heathland restoration projects is ‘to adopt a more holistic approach than in the past. But I can’t see a time when the [legal] protection, designation and planning isn’t needed to protect them from development.’
Isabel Alonso of Natural England is more optimistic. She believes that people’s love of heathland will sustain them. ‘When heathland restoration has trouble from people who don’t like felling trees or grazing livestock, it’s not because they don’t value the place, it’s because they don’t understand its natural and social history,’ she says. ‘The nightjars are spectacular, and if we manage their sites, we will keep them; if not, they’ll disappear. Talking about ecosystem services is showing these places have more value, and biodiversity will bring benefits to people. They value them so much that they won’t let them disappear.’
Understanding ecology
At Prees Heath Common, hemmed in by thundering trunk roads and a grubby prairie of arable agriculture, colonies of black ants that live under lumps of concrete left from the Second World War runway carry on a scurrilous affair with the silver-studded blue butterflies. The ants farm or manage the butterflies from egg through to adult, attending their feeding on heather, milking the caterpillars for their sweet honeydew and harbouring the pupae in their nests before escorting the butterflies to take off like ground crew. It’s a protection racket and a symbiotic relationship that, in order to be sustained, requires a careful understanding of the whole heath’s entire ecology.
While Stephen Lewis, the warden for Butterfly Conservation, was explaining this to me, in between chatting to dog-walkers, a couple of men who may have been travellers prospecting for a pitch pulled up in a flatbed truck. Lewis’s movement between these very different situations seemed indicative of the everyday issues that face heathlands, and also a reminder that they still exist at the margins of things.
With their wild, open landscapes made more mysterious by the secret life going on in them, and their history as the dwelling places of an ancient but marginalised society, heaths are the rough-and-ready antidotes to over-managed countryside – the ‘rude rags of Nature,’ as John Clare put it. As conservationists struggle with a changing world to reclaim more heath, it’s not the land alone that matters. For heathland to stand a chance of a future, it’s those who dwell on them that count; heaths won’t be heaths without the return of the heathens.
November 2011
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