Shaping the Wild

David Elias

Description

What can one Welsh hill farm tell us about how we can help nature thrive?

In this captivating debut, conservationist David Elias explores one a hill farm in Eryri (Snowdonia) National Park and what it can show us about the realities of farming and looking after nature in this environment. As he visits throughout the seasons, he forms a deep relationship with the land and the people who have worked upon it, discovering their history and traditions, current lifestyle and thoughts on their future. He also explores the many farm’s many habitats and the wildlife that can be found upon them and shows how this has been influenced by changing farming practices over the generations.

Through lyrical prose and first-hand conversations with farmers, Elias also shows what current policies have achieved – and not achieved – and why it’s so important that we get a better understanding of the realities and challenges of farming if we are to truly going to reconcile this vital industry while also looking after nature.

Sujets

• Environmental Protection
• Environmental Conservation
• Reino Unido
• United Kingdom
• Great Britain
• North Wales
• Wales
• Nature
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: Calon
• Date de parution: 27 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781915279378
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Shaping the Wild
Shaping the Wild
David Elias
Text David Elias, 2023
Illustrations and map Peter Hanauer, 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owners. Applications for the copyright owners written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to Calon, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-915279-34-7
eISBN: 978-1-915279-37-8
The right of David Elias to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover design by Andy Ward Design
Cover image: Cover image: Clyde Holmes (1940-2008), untitled The Estate of Clyde Holmes
The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Books Council of Wales
Table of Contents
Foreword by Iolo Williams
Chapter 1: Craig-y-t n
Chapter 2: Lambing
Chapter 3: Wild Woods
Chapter 4: Pastures
Chapter 5: Conifers, Foxes and Crows
Chapter 6: Peat
Chapter 7: Moorland Birds
Chapter 8: The River
Chapter 9: Shaping the Wild Woods
Chapter 10: Shearing
Chapter 11: Heather
Chapter 12: Wilding
Chapter 13: In the End
Notes
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
For Gethin, who lives and breathes this life
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread John Muir
Foreword
by Iolo Williams
For thousands of years, humans have continuously struggled to transform the Welsh landscape. Generations of farmers have shed blood, sweat and tears to turn a largely forested country into an intricate mosaic of habitats rich in wildlife. It is only over the past 150 years, a blink of an eye in historical terms, that agriculture and wildlife have come into conflict due to the demands that we as consumers have thrust upon our land managers.
In these pages, David Elias tells the story of Craig-y-t n, a family farm situated near Bala at the southern end of the Eryri (Snowdonia) National Park. It is a beautiful area, but, as any farmer will tell you, beauty does not pay the bills. Successive agri-environment schemes have undoubtedly helped ensure that some wildlife can live alongside modern farming techniques but so many once familiar species, from curlew and corncrake to lapwing and linnet, have fallen by the wayside.
This book takes us through the seasons and across the many landscapes within the farm boundary. With its wild bogs, crystal-clear streams and scattered woodlands, Craig-y-t n is not a typical farm and yet it represents a microcosm of events unfolding throughout rural Wales. The future for our wildlife and farming is an uncertain one, particularly in this post-Brexit era. Throw into this mix the precarious nature of the language and culture of a proud nation and you have a potentially volatile canvas that forms the backdrop to this book.
David Elias is a craftsman, a man who paints vivid pictures with words, and a worthy addition to the pantheon of rural Welsh writing greats such as Bill Condry and Jim Perrin. It is his background, however, that makes him the ideal person to write this story. During his time as warden for the Nature Conservancy Council (later the Countryside Council for Wales) on the Berwyn Mountains, he was also my line manager and mentor for one memorable year in the mid-1980s. His ability to communicate and understand both sides of the potential conservation/farming conflict is one of his greatest assets, as is his eye for detail. Whilst I was spending six glorious months monitoring some of Wales s most threatened wildlife, David was uncomplainingly dealing with the minutiae of landowner management agreements whilst yearning for a day on the open hills with his green, enthusiastic assistant.
Reading this book transports me back to my carefree days on the open moorland of the Berwyn and the valuable lessons learned in David s company. The most fundamental was the realisation that not one of our seemingly wild landscapes here in Wales is untouched by humankind. Beautiful and rich in wildlife some may be, but they have been manipulated and transformed, often by families forced to eke out a living in the harshest of circumstances.
Shaping the Wild also looks at the future of farming and conservation, both at Craig-y-t n and in a wider context. With wholesale changes planned for the agri-environment schemes that have provided a lifeline for many of the small upland farms in Wales, will we witness a mass exodus from the Welsh countryside in the near future? Will family farms be replaced by huge sheep ranches and large-scale tree planting backed by huge corporations as a means of offsetting carbon emissions? As a Welsh-speaking conservationist with farming roots who has lived in the countryside all my life, I certainly hope not.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys nature and the outdoors, has an interest in farming and conservation, or any reader who revels in beautifully written prose. I would also recommend that any relevant politician or decision maker should read this book from cover to cover.
Iolo Williams
Chapter 1
Craig-y-t n

In a North Wales village huddled under the 3,000-foot bulk of Aran Benllyn, about fifty of us stood singing hymns around an open grave. We had come to bury Marged Jones of Craig-y-t n, aged ninety-one years. This warm-hearted, sharp-witted woman had been totally devoted to the community in which she lived all her long life, so it was fitting that so many people had turned out to her funeral service in Yr Hen Gapel, an hour or so before. Marged, along with her five sisters and one brother, was born not three miles away from here in a hill farm called Craig-y-t n and she and her brother, Hywel, both unmarried, never left. They farmed Craig-y-t n for the rest of their working lives.
As I stood amongst the mourners, one of the many thoughts going through my head was that Marged had been a link with an era that has almost passed from direct memory, a time before the countryside changed forever with the coming of mechanisation. Marged s life represents much of what this book is about: how the wildlife and landscape of upland Wales has been, and continues to be, shaped by a very particular human community and culture. Historically, this shaping has been driven mostly by farming and, to a lesser extent, forestry and game shooting, but now the biodiversity and climate crisis demand that the land is also managed for nature, flood prevention, carbon capture and other ecosystem services . At its heart this book is searching for the reconciliation of hill farming, the tradition that Marged understood, and nature conservation, the discipline from which I have come. Beyond the strident headlines and bland policy statements I want to understand what it really takes to bring these two together, and to properly answer that you need to consider the full catastrophe of life, as Zorba the Greek would have had it. 1 If human activity has shaped the wild, and continues to do so, then we need to embrace the full catastrophe and understand the people who do the shaping as well as the wildlife and wild land that inhabit it. How they complement or collide with one another is crucial. With this perspective, it is vital not only to gather information but also to acknowledge how we are affected by wild land and life. What moves us is so often what drives us to action.
In an attempt to address all of this, I have chosen to focus this book on one very particular hill farm, Craig-y-t n, as a lens through which to view the whole rich and ragged picture. With Hywel s blessing I visited the farm repeatedly over a period of nearly seven years between 2015-21, getting to know him, the farming and the wildlife at all seasons in order to grasp a multidimensional picture of hill farming in these times of deep environmental concern and Brexitinduced agricultural upheaval. 2

On an early spring day in 2015, I climb up into the steep woodland on the valley side in Craig-y-t n; this wood has always fascinated me: it seems somehow outside of time, as if no one has ever set foot in it. I sit high up near the top of the wood with my back to a small cliff, in a kind of cwtch in the rocks, so they fit round me keeping off the worst of the cold wind. It s likely people and animals have sheltered here for centuries. Fallen bracken the colour of dried tobacco is folded over the rocks; dotted amongst them are patches of crystalline snow. I can hear Hywel whistling to his dogs lower down the valley. A raven croaks overhead. Half a mile away, and one hundred feet below me, the river sounds like distant motor traffic, dispersed white noise I could easily not hear. Underneath this is a silence, a stillness that is always there. It is that which takes this place out of time.
I understand why I like this spot: I have my back against the wall, and I can see all the territory below me. If I don t move, I am unlikely to be seen amongst the trees. It gives me a sense of both safety and advantage, which could be hardwired in the brain from when we were predator or prey. I also have a sense of expectancy, waiting and watching for something. It is early March, light by 6.30 a.m., and the birds are beginning to sing again; the pregnant ewes will be back here from their away-wintering in three weeks and lambing will begin almost immediately. I realise that what I am looking for are the first signs of spring in the hills - but there is little to encourage me. These woods seem unrelenting; the expectation is only mine.
Where I am sitting at the base of the cliff a series of rocky outcrops tumble down 200 feet in a series o