Land and Livestock, Forest or Field

part two on restoring our grasslands

This is the second piece of a three piece essay on working with our sheep and goats to restore our grasslands. In part one I gave a little bit of an introduction, some background to what we came to and from. This piece continues on from when we arrived.

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The old man who tells us he farmed this land long before us ran cattle here. That man’s love for the land shines from his eyes. He gave it up to marry his love, he tells us with smile that shines even brighter. He showed us where they dug waterholes for the cattle in times of summer drought. But the holes were dry and had fallen in and grown over; there had been no cattle here for a decade by the time we came.

The land was mostly covered with a thick, dead thatch of purple moor grass, Molinia caerulea, the dominant grass species on these wet, acid, marginal pastures. Vigorous and swamping in habit, purple moor grass when it isn’t grazed builds up a rank thatch that smothers the land and dries to tinder. Wildfires blaze periodically across these hills. Controlled burns get out of control. But there were also bare, overgrazed areas of sparse fescue on dry slopes of thin, drought-prone soils where a handful of sheep had kept the sweeter grass tightly cropped.

The first thing that happened above the soil and the alchemy going on at root level which is a whole other story of bugs, shit and fungi to be told some other time, the first dramatically visible, above soil effect of our livestock’s impacts on the land, was an explosion of heather. The heaths as well as the lower lying grasslands had been smothered by years of un-grazed purple moor grass and its thatch, and when our grazing animals—horses, sheep, and goats—came in and munched back the grass those first summers the heather awakened and flourished.

Our heaths and grasslands are the result of a combination of human influence and natural conditions, a dynamic interplay of fire and livestock, climate and landscape, over millennia of human co-relationship with the land. According to first edition ordnance survey maps dated circa 1830, we can see that this land has been open hill—heath and rough grasslands—for at least two hundred years (probably much longer, and long before the blackface sheep now so ubiquitous to these hills were introduced in the later half of the 1800s). But the Old Irish name for the half a square mile townland in which our strip of land lies, Doirín an Chnoic Rua, describes a Little Oak Wood of the Red Hill. The towering, ancient, Irish oaks lining the old, forgotten, stone road along our southern boundary, and the jays that drop their acorns on the heath in a perpetual effort to birth forests anew, concur that once, long ago, this land was wooded—and would likely return to wood if we removed ourselves and our herd from it. As, indeed, was and would most of Ireland. Or so the story goes. Our rugged terrain would actually more likely be an open mosaic of wood, scrub, rock and heath. I think it’s important to understand the history of the land, what came before and what wants to grow here, to inform how we can work with it, but not to get too hung up on how we think it should or shouldn’t be.¹

Nothing in nature is static. Nature is dynamic, ever-changing, ever-evolving. Grassland and forest flora have ebbed and flowed through the ages across this island of Ireland and across these hills. These heaths and grasslands are life and place expressed in present form on an ever-evolving continuum of change.

We happen to have a direct comparison as to how our land would look in real time if we stepped aside, removed ourselves and our livestock from it and let the land return to scrub and wood, and which serves as a reservoir of undisturbed wildlife that spills into our farm: the plot of land adjacent along the full length of our western boundary is left untouched by human hand, machine or livestock for at least a decade, since the last burning, left to the wild to regenerate. The wild land next door is mostly an impenetrable, waist-high tangle of a few grass species (meadow fescue, purple moor grass, Yorkshire fog), banks of bracken and tumbling sprawls of bramble, with knee-deep heather and sparser grasses on the high ridges and thickets of young willow filling the dips and hollows in the landscape. You can barely push your way through the brambles and thick layers of thatch, few orchids find their way up through the grasses in June (on our grazed pastures there are swathes of them), but underneath the brambles and thatch, if you stop still and listen, you’ll hear the rustling of small birds and tiny mammals bustling about their business. The grasslands are still grasslands, if unkempt, for now, but every year they grow scrubbier. The wild land next door provides a comparative study of our impacts on our land and a daily reminder that we are only part of the dance, just one player in the great symphony of life in this landscape. That the land doesn’t need us. The land will be just fine, being wild. We just need to remember our place within it.

Spotted orchids dotting our grasslands in June

To begin with we continued, unwittingly, making the same mistakes as those who came before us, of simultaneously under- and overgrazing. Our horses didn’t cope with the rough ground and tough grasses—they had to go. Running our few sheep and handful of goats here through the summer wasn’t enough. Repeatedly and too frequently running sheep through the summer when cattle or more goats would have done better on the dominant grass species without grazing so tight on the sweet grasses, compounded the problem of parched slopes and rank wetlands. We researched and bought hill breeds that would supposedly eat the purple moor grass, but they just couldn’t eat it fast enough and would always go for the more delicate, softer grasses and forbs first while the more vigorous, tough, purple moor grass raced ahead of them. Yes, we saw an explosion of heather and a gradual greening and increase of diversity as our grazing animals opened up the sward, trampled the thatch and fed the soil. But we also couldn’t shift those bare and overgrazed patches, the sheep always seeking the newest, sweetest grasses. Lest I lose any sheep lovers, it wasn’t so much a thing of numbers, but of timing. Sheep work this land better in winter, we have found, eating the frost-softened gorse and sweet heather while the grasses lie dormant. Any of the old-school farmers still working these hills probably could have told us that. We figured it out when we finally came to be here with our flock year-round.

Cattle have traditionally been run on these hills and will eat the tough, dominant grasses that sheep won’t eat without grazing so tight on the sweeter grasses as sheep tend to. Cattle are out of the question for us—too much red tape to start out without an existing cattle herd number, and I’ve got my hands full already. But we have goats for the job. And as much as I love my sheep, I cannot deny that my goats work this landscape much more sensitively (as long as we can keep them off the trees), happily working over and thriving on the tough, dominant grasses and scrub at nose level while allowing the softer, sweet grasses and forbs to establish below. We’ve come up with a system of working with goats and sheep, working field by field over the grasslands to knock back the moor grass and begin to establish greener, tastier, more diverse and productive pastures.

But, this is growing into many more words than I anticipated so I’m going to let it run into a third and final piece.

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1. Franz Vera’s Grazing Ecology and Forest History is a fascinating study that challenges the closed forest theory of Western and Central Europe and proposes an alternative hypothesis: The natural vegetation consist[ed] of a mosaic of large and small grasslands, scrub, solitary trees and groups of trees, in which the indigenous fauna of large herbivores [wa]s essential for the regeneration of the characteristic trees and shrubs… The wood-pasture can be seen as the closest modern analogy for this landscape. Ireland’s unique island situation is a little bit different, with a long absence of large herbivores prior to human introductions of livestock, but Vera’s research shows that some of our most important ancient woodland trees in including Irish (sessile) oak and hazel do not regenerate under closed forest but require open heaths and grasslands. It’s an interesting read, not to dispute that Ireland probably was, at one time, mostly wooded, or that planting trees and regenerating woodlands are vital and worthy things to do, but to question the popular narrative that points to a particular period of ecological succession, assuming a climax vegetation of closed forest, just prior to human/livestock influence, as how it should or would always be. The lifespan of an oak is but a blip on the continuum of change.