Tag: grouse moor management
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Cherry-Picking the Ashes
Another shot from yesterday, taken not a hundred yards away. This is Penrod Spring. These days it amounts to little more than a damp patch in the heather, not easy to find. Once, though, it mattered enough that somebody built a dry-stone wall round it, by hand, stone on stone, to mark it out as…
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Unmanaged Blaze on Hutton Moor
Experts love a crisis. Last year, the tiny heather beetle was going to end the world as we know it. They claimed the infestation had turned the moors into a massive tinderbox of kindling—they may well have been right. But they also predicted a grey, withered future for the purple foliage. They were a bit…
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The Swidden That Would Not Turn Purple
Here, on Great Ayton Moor, a swidden burnt a few seasons back to bring on fresh heather for the grouse. But judging by the tussocks, deer-grass had other plans. The plan was for heather — tender purple shoots laid on like a buffet for red grouse. What grew back was this: a spiky green swathe…
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The Great Heather Gamble
Europe is burning, and nobody has bothered telling the weather. Wildfires in Spain and France are breaking records while the Cairngorms also feels the heat. The North York Moors is not a stranger to this chaos. A massive blaze last year turned twenty-five square kilometres of one moor into a cinder. The Moorland Association has…
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Crabdale Beck: The Vanishing of G834
A venture up to the Swainby Shooting House on Whorlton Moor, part of the Snilesworth Estate. This photo is looking up Crabdale Beck which drains the moor. The “house” can be seen on the skyline if you look closely. Crabdale Beck flows the same way it has for ten thousand years, albeit a bit gentler.…
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Iron Age on the Moors: Percy Rigg’s Hidden Houses
For centuries, five Iron Age round houses sat quietly on this ridge in North Yorkshire, and nobody noticed. Not bad for a neighbourhood that was probably occupied for over 300 years. The site was only spotted in 1962, when Fred Proud of Sleddale Farm found it and reported it to local archaeologists Roland Close and…
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Cool Burns and Warm Fictions
Ah, that warm, pungent smell of a recent so-called “cool burn”. Now, I do not know whether these moorland burns truly reduce the fuel load and help prevent catastrophic wildfires as it is claimed. I will heed the scientists and the fire brigade experts, but I am immediately sceptical of lobby groups pushing a single…
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When Infographics Burn Brighter Than Evidence
An image drifted across my feed this morning: a mugshot of a certain former prince. Briefly amusing, obviously fake, the work of some obliging AI dressed up as reality. Elsewhere, a Facebook post from the Moorland Association offered something far less harmless. A polished infographic declared, with confident certainty, that ‘The “Burn-to-Rewet” Method Cuts Methane…
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Toad in the Hole
How thoughtful the keepers appear to be, fashioning what looks like a charming wildlife pond in the middle of the grouse moor. A touching gesture, if one overlooks the small detail that this idyllic pool is also a shooting butt where folk crouch, lie in wait, and unleash a storm of shot at birds driven…
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Purple Heather, Brown Truth
The ling, or common heather, has reached its peak bloom just days before the start of the grouse shooting season — the annual spectacle in which profit and sport take precedence over the land itself. This year, the display is patchy. Whole swathes have turned a brittle reddish-brown, appearing dead but showing faint signs of…