Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 2 (2006), p. 347

incl. p&p from Mrs Kathryn Brown, 38 Mill Road, Bozeat, Northants, nn29 7ja.

As the future of the hills and uplands of Britain continues to be fiercely debated both in agricultural and political circles, this volume of thirteen essays is a timely reminder that the mountains and moorlands have long played a dynamic role in the economy and culture of these islands. The book itself concentrates on the post-medieval period and attempts wide coverage of the environmental and ecological changes wrought by developments in agricultural and industrial technologies in the upland regions.

Introductory essays by paleoecologists Margaret Atherden and Richard Tipping are followed by Angus Winchester’s detailed account of the management of upland forests in medieval England wherein he shows how the boundaries of forest and chase retreated into the heart of the uplands while numbers of deer dwindled when confronted with the inevitable competition from sheep. Bob Dodgshon’s elegant quantitative account of the shift away from traditional Highland practices towards commercial sheep farming, Peter Herring’s discussion of Cornwall, and other contributions testify to the profound ecological changes which follow in the wake of changes in the ratio of different upland grazing species. Ecological change also followed in the wake of enclosure, the familiar story of which is covered by John Chapman, while Eleanor Straughton considers common land utilization since enclosure, bringing to bear an international dimension to her chapter. Much of this, of course, is familiar stuff. In like manner, Ian Whyte’s essay on the impact of mining and quarrying shows how the environmental impacts are both immediately apparent and darkly more insidious as heavy metals contaminate soil, vegetation, livestock and people. Inevitably, economic and technical advance leads to social change and Mark Brayshay and Andrew Williams reveal that in Snowdonia long-term continuity punctuated by brief periods of rapid change have transformed both landscape and society. The combined effects of nineteenth and twentieth century estate and farm rationalization, followed more recently by the trauma of Chernobyl and the disastrous consequences of BSE and Foot and Mouth disease, have meant not only elements of ecological change, but a contraction in the number of full time farms in the Llanberis valley from forty seven in 1868 to a mere five in 2001.

Elsewhere in Wales, R.J.Silvester demonstrates how pressure on upland commons from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, be it from overgrazing, encroachment, peat and bracken cutting or even shooting, left physical evidence in some shape or form. Moreover he shows that while the creation of seigneurial forests or the acquisition of lands by monastic institutions can be illustrated from documentary sources, where court rolls and other local records have not survived it becomes nigh-on impossible to describe the utilization of medieval uplands. The survival of huts, enclosures and the bases of buildings can offer some clues, although of course it is by no means certain that many (if any) of these ruins are of medieval or prehistoric provenance. It is extraordinarily difficult, in the absence of datable artefacts, to differentiate between the base of a medieval hut and a nineteenth-century shepherd’s shelter. Besides, even if the thousands of surviving huts in different parts of upland Britain were of proven medieval date, we could only intelligently speculate on the nature of the economy they oversaw if we knew with certainty whether they were permanently or seasonally occupied. And what of these allegedly ‘medieval’ strip cultivation systems increasingly revealed by aerial photography in the hills of mid-Wales? They look suspiciously like early nineteenth-century cultivation ridges to me. In fact a few years ago I stumbled across an abandoned nineteenth-century plough close to one of the sites now claimed to be of medieval provenance!

While agricultural change has its inevitable effects on upland ecology, the influence of collecting and gathering is sometimes ignored or underplayed, and the contribution to this volume by Rotherham, Egan and Ardron on the effects of peat and turf utilization shows just how widespread these practices were in upland Britain. Peat cutting (and to a lesser extent the gathering of broom, gorse, rushes and bracken for a variety of purposes) had significant effects on vegetation, soil and hydrology. It is sadly ironic that those melancholy, dreary and featureless deserts of Nardus and Molinea which develop after the removal of peat are now considered by the green primitives to be worthy of preservation.

The most interesting and original essay in this collection is contributed by Melanie Tebbutt and is essentially a consideration of the imaginative geographies of the Peak, the association of the northern uplands with freethinking and radicalism and as a metaphor for masculinity with the inevitable homoerotic elements. Contrasting the ‘masculine’ north with the soft ‘feminized’ downlands of southern England, Tebbutt shows that the hills were seen as bastions of purity and wholesomeness against the squalor of urban life.

The final chapter, by Guy Robinson, reviews the development and organization of National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and kindred designated zones and discusses how farmers are being encouraged to contribute to strategies of environmental maintenance and enhancement. Unfortunately, neither Robinson nor other contributors to this useful and well-illustrated volume emphasize the vitally important point that the traditional pattern of the hills and uplands will only be maintained by a thriving farming population who are paid to ensure that the proper balance of sheep and cattle are grazed so as to sustain the botanical integrity of upland swards. What is certain, as the economist Peter Midmore and I have shown, is that for all the talk of the bughunters, twitchers, and aficionados of bog and bush, the visiting public want above all to see a well-farmed and husbanded landscape, while the farmers themselves (essentially the creators of that landscape) want, above all, to farm.