Footprints in the Grass
third and final part on grazing and grasslands
In writing this little mini series of essaylets on the simple act of restoring green and diverse pastures to the old, degraded and rank grasslands we came to when we bought this land, I found my words losing themselves, stifled by the limitations of writing online for a blog-length newsletter and lost in all the stuff I wanted to say but didn’t. For every sentence I published, another three were stripped away for the sake of keeping the piece to a readable word count. I lost nuance. I lost context. I lost threads of conversation, depths of exploration. And I lost the point. I found myself trying to justify what we’re doing here and why. The thing is, farming in Ireland, and hill farming in particular, has come under such fire that we often feel we have to defend every action. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Some things do need to change and it’s no harm that we’re pushed to think deeply about our actions and impacts on the land. Or perhaps, as an English-born woman raised in Ireland, acutely aware of the association of these open lands and the sheep that graze them with a long, brutal and exploitative history of British oppression, I am treading a little over-sensitively.
I have spent many hours researching the story of this land, and the land of Ireland. The stories of our woodlands, heaths, grasslands and hills, the story of farming in Ireland, the waves of colonisation and their impacts on the land from the first tribes of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and later settlements of Neolithic farmers, to British occupation through recent centuries and EU governance today. There is not an inch of Ireland untouched throughout the centuries by human hands. We have no concept of, no wilderness left untouched to show us what this land would look like without human influence. Ancient Ireland’s people were farmers, have been farmers since the arrival of those first farmers and their livestock four thousand years BC. Ireland’s history is long and complex, but throughout it all, people have farmed and lived in these hills.
This whole series could have simply read: These heaths and grasslands have been in existence as a dynamic interplay between humans and landscape for many centuries. They support a wealth of habitat for a wealth of wildlife. If our heaths and grasslands are to continue as heaths and grasslands, supporting the richness of life that reside within them, as part of them, then our heaths and grasslands must be grazed by livestock, as they have been for thousands of years because there are no native large herbivores in Ireland to maintain these ecosystems—they are the result of human/farming influence over millennia. They’re called “semi-natural” to denote human influence in their development and continuation. But my question is: At what point does human influence on ecosystems become unnatural? I have long pondered that question, and I’m just going to leave it hanging here for now.
We’re right on the edge of the uplands, on a ridge of rugged rock between the lightly “improved” patchwork of fields, farmlands and woods below and the open, high hill above. Our “unimproved” rough grasslands have never been touched by machine (except probably digging a couple of drains decades ago that have long since fallen in and grown over) or chemical spray or artificial fertiliser. They’ve never been ploughed or subsoiled or reseeded. Our rough grasslands have existed largely unchanged for centuries, kept fresh and thriving by people and livestock. This is the wild landscape that we tiptoed into.
But our grasslands had been mismanaged for some years and were in a combination of poor, overgrazed and rank, overgrown condition when we came to them. And yet contained a richness of life that we, coming from our little, lowland homestead surrounded by lifeless, nitrate-green silage fields where contractors in giant machines sprayed poisons and stripped cash from land they never set their feet on, were awed and humbled by. Enormous orb spiders spun their webs across the paths, mountain hares leapt about on the dry heaths and marsh fritillaries danced through flooded fields of devil’s bit scabious. Coming from a very different type of farming, on deep, but depleted, lowland soils, our journey here has been learning to work with this sensitive, wild and unforgiving landscape while tiptoeing around the life already here and still producing enough food for ourselves and maybe, if we can, because we have access to land and livestock and therefore should, having a little bit to share with our community. It’s never been about business or making money. We don’t care about being profitable and it’s never going to be. We just care about living in place, in accordance with and feeding ourselves from the land we live on. We have twenty-two acres of rough, marginal land made up of old, unimproved, rank and degraded grasslands and heath to work with. It’s not a lot of ground, and it’s very, very poor ground. If it is to support us and our small sheep flock and even smaller goat herd, we need to restore the soils and grasslands to a more fertile and generous condition, and we need to do so as sensitively, as delicately as we can.
This land is difficult. It does not have the generous, forgiving soils of the lowlands, and nor do we have hundreds of acres to leave our flock run wild like the sheep on the high hills. But we believe in our place on the land, as farmers, as gardeners, as co-creators of our landscape, as humans. To remember our place on the land is to let go of the colonial mindset of separation and exploitation of the land as a resource that pervades our farming systems, and relearn a relationship of symbiosis with a living system of which we are part. The rest is just trying to work with what we have from where we are, and leave footprints that will fill with wildflowers.
So to what we’ve actually done: very little besides speed up regeneration on some particularly poor areas by strategically placing seedy meadow hay piles for the sheep to eat and spread over bare ground in winter, throwing down some carefully selected, native grass and forb seed on bare soil for the sheep to trample and manure, and then, crucially, keeping the sheep off those areas for recovery—that’s what our fences are for (I’m not a fan of tightly managed grazing and that really isn’t possible on this ground anyway—our animals mostly have free run over large areas to go where and eat what they choose) and this is where our goats come in to keep the more vigorous, dominating purple moor grass and heather chomped back while the new grasses establish—they prefer the older, woody browse and unless forced with nothing else to eat they don’t mow tight on the sweet new grasses like sheep do.
What we have seen, more than anything we’ve done, is how the land responds to the animals—the old, rank grasslands slowly greening and sweetening in response to the munching and manuring of the grazers even without any other inputs from us, on the low-lying wet fields where we have done nothing but let the animals in to graze back the purple moor grass and open up the sward, now filling with sweet grasses, rushes, sedges and forbs. Our main and most challenging role as keepers is keeping our flock and herd in balance with the land’s capacity to hold them. The land’s capacity to hold them ebbs and flows with the seasons, mirrored in the flock’s breeding cycles and our harvest cycles in a constantly rebalancing act of give and take. As keepers, we must also assume our role as hunters, at times as ruthlessly as the seasons.
The rest of this piece will be a series of “before and after” photographs showing some of the changes we’re seeing as we learn to work with this land, from what we came to, to where we are now.
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