North Pennines
I’m standing in a barn discussing Ajax’s sex life. He’ll apparently ‘go’ with five females this summer and could ‘go’ with 35 if it wasn’t for concerns about sexually transmitted diseases. I look into Ajax’s eyes to see what he thinks about all this. Not much, it seems: he’s too busy munching on some hay.
Ajax is a bull, by the way. And not just any bull. He’s a strappingly handsome 1.5-tonne specimen whose brother was Hereford Bull of the Year last year. While I chat with his owner, Harry Elliott, I brush out Ajax’s winter coat to reveal the glossy, auburn hair hidden underneath. But he has to do more than look good this year: he needs to father some prize-winning offspring.
Elliott is a smallholder high up on the North Pennines, the UK’s second-largest Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) – almost 2,000 square kilometres of wild open moorland and dales that straddle the counties of Cumbria, Durham and Northumberland in the north of England. And Ajax is one of his 18-strong herd of Herefords, a rare breed of cattle whose foraging skills are well suited to the area.
Elliott breeds them for the show ring rather than the butchers because it brings in more cash and spares him emotional trips to the abattoir. But despite the cattle’s extra value at market, rising feed costs are beginning to threaten the economic viability of the herd.
‘Feed has gone up £70 a tonne last month and another £70 a tonne this month. So overall, our feed costs have gone up – God knows – maybe £1,000 a year,’ says Elliott. ‘It’s come to the stage of, “Can we keep this going or can we not?”, because right now, we’re not making enough money to break even.’
The success of Elliott’s cows isn’t only important to him, it’s essential for the conservation of Britain’s upland hay meadows, which rely on traditional farming to survive. There are only 11 square kilometres of this habitat left in the UK; 40 per cent of it is found in the North Pennines and one of the best examples is up in Elliott’s top field.
Making hay
We head up there in a small group: Rebecca Barrett, the AONB’s Hay Time project manager, Elliott, myself and Nell the sheepdog. In spring, the meadow is a motley assortment of small green plants on an exposed hillside, but in summer, it transforms into a mass of wildflowers.
For most of the year, hay meadows just look like a field of grass. But on close inspection, you might find more than 30 different species growing in each square metre (hence the hotchpotch appearance) and nearly 100 in a whole meadow, including ten or more grass species.
One reason that Elliott’s meadows put on such a good display is that they haven’t been subjected to intensive farming. ‘There are four things you need for a really good hay meadow,’ Barrett explains. ‘Low levels of nutrients, a late cutting date (mid-July at the earliest), an annual rain of seed, and cattle.’
With support from payments from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Elliott is encouraged to maintain these conditions by not using artificial fertilisers, cutting the hay in September (giving the flowers time to dry and drop their seed), and letting his cattle graze the meadow after the hay has been brought in.
‘It’s called aftermath grazing,’ Barrett says. ‘It’s when the cattle are put in the field to eat what’s left of the hay and the flush of growth that comes afterwards. They trample all the seed into the ground and [their hooves] make places where the seed can germinate.’
If meadows such as Elliott’s can be conserved, the Hay Time project can use them as donor meadows. Their seed will then be matched with local farms that lost their biodiversity during the 1970s and ’80s when the government was encouraging farms to increase their efficiency and productivity.
Barrett is keen to protect the meadows because their history in the area stretches back thousands of years. ‘You can almost trace it to the time when this whole area was covered in forest,’ she says. ‘Meadows evolved from glades in woodlands, and a lot of the species you find here – such as the wood crane’s-bill – were originally woodland plants.’
But, she says, it’s easy to romanticise the traditional haymaking era, and interviews with retired farmers in the area have thrown up a range of thoughts on the activity. For example, Willy Wearmouth describes hay as ‘beautiful stuff’ that would come out ‘light brown’, rather like ‘baccy’. But others described hay time as ‘the blight of my life’, says Barrett, who explains how the farming families would ‘be up at dawn for days and days’, with some of them still finishing off the job in October. ‘It was really hard work.’
Today, tractors make hay time easier but farmers still struggle to produce enough, despite following the AONB’s haymaking recommendations. ‘I get 79 bales off the meadows from doing what I’m told, but I’ll still have to buy in 40 or so bales,’ says Elliott. ‘It would probably be cheaper to bung some fertiliser on the field and get enough grass to feed the cattle. But I don’t want to do that. I’d rather keep it as natural and old-fashioned as possible.’
‘It’s a really fine balance,’ Barrett says. ‘One of the reasons this field is so species-rich is because the soil is low in nutrients. If you add nitrogen-heavy fertilisers, all the really vigorous grasses and buttercups grow and block everything else out.’ But, she adds, ‘it’s important for the farmer to get enough crop to feed the cattle so it’s a properly functioning system, because hay meadows wouldn’t be here if farmers weren’t cutting the hay.’
Elliott’s farm is supported by the bed-and-breakfast operation run by his wife, Jan, in their 200-year-old farmhouse and nearby cottages, which, he says, ‘makes more money than the farm’. Shane Harris, the AONB’s sustainable tourism officer, says: ‘There’s a significant number of farmers involved in tourism,’ adding that the AONB is keen to support them because it’s ‘part of the mix of keeping the upland dales viable’.
Living on the edge
In some ways, this has always been a marginal community, perched right on the edge of where it’s possible for humans to comfortably exist. It’s a beautiful landscape, especially where the rugged fields of the upland farms give way to the wild moorlands, but it’s also a cold, wet climate and a difficult environment in which to live.
‘I challenge you to find anywhere else in the UK where you get human habitation at this altitude,’ says Ian Forbes, manager of the North of England Lead Mining Museum in Killhope in the heart of the AONB. ‘We’re 1,500 feet [460 metres] above sea level here and there are farms that are even higher up.
‘It’s not sensible to be here. It’s too harsh. It’s only as inhabited as it is because of the mineral wealth underneath,’ he continues. ‘That’s why you get so many houses and small fields this far up the valley, this high up the hill. They were drawn here by the lead mining and then this dual economy of smallholding developed.’
But Forbes says that a new wave of residents is appearing: ‘A lot of people are recolonising now because of climate change and increased access to services.’ Jan Elliott confirms this: ‘When we got here, it was totally dark. It’s only in the past ten years lights have come on in the valley.’ The new residents still had to spend years using generators before they were connected to the mains.
Above the inhabited valleys, the peat moorlands contain preserved pollen proving how far humans have encroached onto the hills. ‘There is evidence of cereal planting in the moorlands much higher up than it is today – in the medieval period, and again in the Napoleonic period,’ says Forbes, who views the human presence in the area as ‘a tide going in and out, rising higher and lower down the valley’.
Secrets of the peat
‘These peatlands have taken 10,000 years to form, so there’s 10,000 years of history in there,’ says Paul Leadbitter, the AONB’s Peatscapes project manager. That history includes remnants of ancient forests, a dead body (a mysterious 18th-century coffin was found buried on the moor by a shepherd in 1921. Inside were a body and a bullet. Many believe it’s a Jacobite soldier, but Forbes suggests it might be a suicide victim who was refused a church burial), and the horns of a wild cattle that might be more than 3,500 years old.
But the peatlands are about the future as well as the past. Many of them are owned by huge grouse-shooting estates, which bring a much-needed boost to the local economy. The peatlands are also vital in the fight against climate change.
‘Each hectare of peat contains about 2,000 tonnes of carbon,’ says Leadbitter. ‘So we estimate that, in our patch of the North Pennines, we have about 660 million tonnes of carbon – which is about 30 years of emissions from Britain’s largest power plant, Drax in North Yorkshire.’
To keep the carbon locked in, the peat needs to stay wet, which is why the peatscapes project is blocking up the ‘grips’ (drains) that were dug out of the moors in the 1960s and ’70s
in a misguided attempt to increase productivity. Blocking the grips prevents the stored carbon oxidising to form carbon dioxide, stops local drinking water discolouring, helps prevent flooding and provides a habitat for amphibians such as the great-crested newt.
‘We’ve blocked 200 kilometres of grips this year, which is seven times what we’d planned, but there are 6,000 kilometres more to do,’ says Leadbitter, who explains how mechanical diggers are brought onto the moors and used to plug the grips with peat. ‘It’s simple, quick and relatively inexpensive.’
The work highlights the environmental importance of the North Pennines – and it isn’t just the moors that are the forefront of conservation, says Barrett. ‘People have just carried on with more traditional ways up here. Now, things have turned around to such an extent that the North Pennines is becoming an example for the rest of Britain.’
LOCAL KNOWLEDGE: top tips for getting the most out of the North Pennines
Where to get a taste of the North Pennines
‘The farmers in our valley sell their meat through the Weardale Quality Meat Initiative (www.weardalemeat.co.uk), or there’s a farmers market in Stanhope every fourth Saturday.’
Jan Elliott, owner of Low Cornriggs Farm bed and breakfast (www.alstonandkillhoperidingcentre.co.uk)
Where to see red squirrels in the North Pennines
‘If you go up to the hides behind the museum, our small colony of squirrels often comes out to feed, at around 3pm.’
Tina Raynor, commercial services officer at the North of England Lead Mining Museum in Killhope (www.killhope.org.uk)
Where to walk through hay meadows
‘There’s a public footpath through Carrs Farm in Wolsingham. They have an abundance of great burnet flowers there, which are stunning, and they cut their meadows very late so you might still see them in August.’
Rebecca Barrett, AONB Hay Time project manager
Where to see ancient trees preserved in peat
‘You can see the tree line (parts of buried trees that are several thousand years old) down by the water’s edge at Smiddy Shaw reservoir.’
Paul Leadbitter, AONB Peatscapes project manager
Ajax is a bull, by the way. And not just any bull. He’s a strappingly handsome 1.5-tonne specimen whose brother was Hereford Bull of the Year last year. While I chat with his owner, Harry Elliott, I brush out Ajax’s winter coat to reveal the glossy, auburn hair hidden underneath. But he has to do more than look good this year: he needs to father some prize-winning offspring.
Elliott is a smallholder high up on the North Pennines, the UK’s second-largest Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) – almost 2,000 square kilometres of wild open moorland and dales that straddle the counties of Cumbria, Durham and Northumberland in the north of England. And Ajax is one of his 18-strong herd of Herefords, a rare breed of cattle whose foraging skills are well suited to the area.
Elliott breeds them for the show ring rather than the butchers because it brings in more cash and spares him emotional trips to the abattoir. But despite the cattle’s extra value at market, rising feed costs are beginning to threaten the economic viability of the herd.
‘Feed has gone up £70 a tonne last month and another £70 a tonne this month. So overall, our feed costs have gone up – God knows – maybe £1,000 a year,’ says Elliott. ‘It’s come to the stage of, “Can we keep this going or can we not?”, because right now, we’re not making enough money to break even.’
The success of Elliott’s cows isn’t only important to him, it’s essential for the conservation of Britain’s upland hay meadows, which rely on traditional farming to survive. There are only 11 square kilometres of this habitat left in the UK; 40 per cent of it is found in the North Pennines and one of the best examples is up in Elliott’s top field.
Making hay
We head up there in a small group: Rebecca Barrett, the AONB’s Hay Time project manager, Elliott, myself and Nell the sheepdog. In spring, the meadow is a motley assortment of small green plants on an exposed hillside, but in summer, it transforms into a mass of wildflowers.
For most of the year, hay meadows just look like a field of grass. But on close inspection, you might find more than 30 different species growing in each square metre (hence the hotchpotch appearance) and nearly 100 in a whole meadow, including ten or more grass species.
One reason that Elliott’s meadows put on such a good display is that they haven’t been subjected to intensive farming. ‘There are four things you need for a really good hay meadow,’ Barrett explains. ‘Low levels of nutrients, a late cutting date (mid-July at the earliest), an annual rain of seed, and cattle.’
With support from payments from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Elliott is encouraged to maintain these conditions by not using artificial fertilisers, cutting the hay in September (giving the flowers time to dry and drop their seed), and letting his cattle graze the meadow after the hay has been brought in.
‘It’s called aftermath grazing,’ Barrett says. ‘It’s when the cattle are put in the field to eat what’s left of the hay and the flush of growth that comes afterwards. They trample all the seed into the ground and [their hooves] make places where the seed can germinate.’
If meadows such as Elliott’s can be conserved, the Hay Time project can use them as donor meadows. Their seed will then be matched with local farms that lost their biodiversity during the 1970s and ’80s when the government was encouraging farms to increase their efficiency and productivity.
Barrett is keen to protect the meadows because their history in the area stretches back thousands of years. ‘You can almost trace it to the time when this whole area was covered in forest,’ she says. ‘Meadows evolved from glades in woodlands, and a lot of the species you find here – such as the wood crane’s-bill – were originally woodland plants.’
But, she says, it’s easy to romanticise the traditional haymaking era, and interviews with retired farmers in the area have thrown up a range of thoughts on the activity. For example, Willy Wearmouth describes hay as ‘beautiful stuff’ that would come out ‘light brown’, rather like ‘baccy’. But others described hay time as ‘the blight of my life’, says Barrett, who explains how the farming families would ‘be up at dawn for days and days’, with some of them still finishing off the job in October. ‘It was really hard work.’
Today, tractors make hay time easier but farmers still struggle to produce enough, despite following the AONB’s haymaking recommendations. ‘I get 79 bales off the meadows from doing what I’m told, but I’ll still have to buy in 40 or so bales,’ says Elliott. ‘It would probably be cheaper to bung some fertiliser on the field and get enough grass to feed the cattle. But I don’t want to do that. I’d rather keep it as natural and old-fashioned as possible.’
‘It’s a really fine balance,’ Barrett says. ‘One of the reasons this field is so species-rich is because the soil is low in nutrients. If you add nitrogen-heavy fertilisers, all the really vigorous grasses and buttercups grow and block everything else out.’ But, she adds, ‘it’s important for the farmer to get enough crop to feed the cattle so it’s a properly functioning system, because hay meadows wouldn’t be here if farmers weren’t cutting the hay.’
Elliott’s farm is supported by the bed-and-breakfast operation run by his wife, Jan, in their 200-year-old farmhouse and nearby cottages, which, he says, ‘makes more money than the farm’. Shane Harris, the AONB’s sustainable tourism officer, says: ‘There’s a significant number of farmers involved in tourism,’ adding that the AONB is keen to support them because it’s ‘part of the mix of keeping the upland dales viable’.
Living on the edge
In some ways, this has always been a marginal community, perched right on the edge of where it’s possible for humans to comfortably exist. It’s a beautiful landscape, especially where the rugged fields of the upland farms give way to the wild moorlands, but it’s also a cold, wet climate and a difficult environment in which to live.
‘I challenge you to find anywhere else in the UK where you get human habitation at this altitude,’ says Ian Forbes, manager of the North of England Lead Mining Museum in Killhope in the heart of the AONB. ‘We’re 1,500 feet [460 metres] above sea level here and there are farms that are even higher up.
‘It’s not sensible to be here. It’s too harsh. It’s only as inhabited as it is because of the mineral wealth underneath,’ he continues. ‘That’s why you get so many houses and small fields this far up the valley, this high up the hill. They were drawn here by the lead mining and then this dual economy of smallholding developed.’
But Forbes says that a new wave of residents is appearing: ‘A lot of people are recolonising now because of climate change and increased access to services.’ Jan Elliott confirms this: ‘When we got here, it was totally dark. It’s only in the past ten years lights have come on in the valley.’ The new residents still had to spend years using generators before they were connected to the mains.
Above the inhabited valleys, the peat moorlands contain preserved pollen proving how far humans have encroached onto the hills. ‘There is evidence of cereal planting in the moorlands much higher up than it is today – in the medieval period, and again in the Napoleonic period,’ says Forbes, who views the human presence in the area as ‘a tide going in and out, rising higher and lower down the valley’.
Secrets of the peat
‘These peatlands have taken 10,000 years to form, so there’s 10,000 years of history in there,’ says Paul Leadbitter, the AONB’s Peatscapes project manager. That history includes remnants of ancient forests, a dead body (a mysterious 18th-century coffin was found buried on the moor by a shepherd in 1921. Inside were a body and a bullet. Many believe it’s a Jacobite soldier, but Forbes suggests it might be a suicide victim who was refused a church burial), and the horns of a wild cattle that might be more than 3,500 years old.
But the peatlands are about the future as well as the past. Many of them are owned by huge grouse-shooting estates, which bring a much-needed boost to the local economy. The peatlands are also vital in the fight against climate change.
‘Each hectare of peat contains about 2,000 tonnes of carbon,’ says Leadbitter. ‘So we estimate that, in our patch of the North Pennines, we have about 660 million tonnes of carbon – which is about 30 years of emissions from Britain’s largest power plant, Drax in North Yorkshire.’
To keep the carbon locked in, the peat needs to stay wet, which is why the peatscapes project is blocking up the ‘grips’ (drains) that were dug out of the moors in the 1960s and ’70s
in a misguided attempt to increase productivity. Blocking the grips prevents the stored carbon oxidising to form carbon dioxide, stops local drinking water discolouring, helps prevent flooding and provides a habitat for amphibians such as the great-crested newt.
‘We’ve blocked 200 kilometres of grips this year, which is seven times what we’d planned, but there are 6,000 kilometres more to do,’ says Leadbitter, who explains how mechanical diggers are brought onto the moors and used to plug the grips with peat. ‘It’s simple, quick and relatively inexpensive.’
The work highlights the environmental importance of the North Pennines – and it isn’t just the moors that are the forefront of conservation, says Barrett. ‘People have just carried on with more traditional ways up here. Now, things have turned around to such an extent that the North Pennines is becoming an example for the rest of Britain.’
LOCAL KNOWLEDGE: top tips for getting the most out of the North Pennines
Where to get a taste of the North Pennines
‘The farmers in our valley sell their meat through the Weardale Quality Meat Initiative (www.weardalemeat.co.uk), or there’s a farmers market in Stanhope every fourth Saturday.’
Jan Elliott, owner of Low Cornriggs Farm bed and breakfast (www.alstonandkillhoperidingcentre.co.uk)
Where to see red squirrels in the North Pennines
‘If you go up to the hides behind the museum, our small colony of squirrels often comes out to feed, at around 3pm.’
Tina Raynor, commercial services officer at the North of England Lead Mining Museum in Killhope (www.killhope.org.uk)
Where to walk through hay meadows
‘There’s a public footpath through Carrs Farm in Wolsingham. They have an abundance of great burnet flowers there, which are stunning, and they cut their meadows very late so you might still see them in August.’
Rebecca Barrett, AONB Hay Time project manager
Where to see ancient trees preserved in peat
‘You can see the tree line (parts of buried trees that are several thousand years old) down by the water’s edge at Smiddy Shaw reservoir.’
Paul Leadbitter, AONB Peatscapes project manager
