Learning from the Land

part one on pastures and working with livestock on the land

Jul 21, 2024

Looking west, late March 2021. The winter-hued grasslands in early spring.

When I sat down this week to write a long-promised piece on our pastures, how we’re working with our sheep and goats to bring our old, rank, Molinia dominated grasslands back to a greener and more diverse state, I realised some background is needed. And then I realised there’s so much more to say, so much nuance and context to fit into the conversation that I just couldn’t squash it all into one piece. So, this is part one of a two or maybe three piece essay that will come over the next few weeks. A short introduction to set the scene.

The hill was dressed in drab gold when I came to walk this parcel of land for the first time in early spring. I came here on a whim. We had already put an offer on a couple of acres of nice, low-lying, tree-lined, silage-green fields close to our little, lowland homestead—our little stepping-stone home, the cottage on an acre that we had quickly outgrown and needed to expand or move on from. But it was taking too long, costing too much—more than we had. And something wasn’t right. I was impatient. So on a whim, I drove up here, knowing it was too far and too wild. Knowing it was crazy. We weren’t even real farmers, after all. Certainly not hill farmers. We were just part-time smallholders in pursuit of “the good life”, tired of getting by on rented and borrowed land, looking for a few acres to call our own, to settle in place, to run our few sheep and goats and grow our own food with a little bit of surplus to trade.

This land changed everything. This land met me with endless horizons; a rolling, rugged, tundra-like landscape of winter-hued dwarf scrub and cinnamon thatch delineated by cliffs and ridges of exposed shale, set against a stunning backdrop of shadowed mountains meeting grey sky. Coming here, placing my feet on the sodden soil, climbing ridge after ridge of solid shale that gave way to another and another sloping field of waist-high, dormant brown grasses and red budding bog myrtle that soaked me with spring rain and the fresh, aromatic scent of the hills, the land gushing and gurgling and squelching underfoot, hares startling from the long grass and I, soaked and breathless and awakened, I remembered what it is to be wild. This land was four times the acreage for half the price of the little plot we could barely afford close to our little, outgrown homestead. And it thrummed with a rhythm that my cells recognised, that ran deep through my bones and called me home.

This was a strip of marginal, hill land, a ridge of shale, peat and clay where the valley meets the mountains, where once, we might imagine, were woods and meadows, now open heaths and unkept grasslands, sold as rough grazing. A far cry from the lush, lowland farms and fields we had rented and borrowed. It meant changing how we farmed, and what we farmed. We wouldn’t be growing rows of radishes or beds of kitchen herbs and roses. It meant trading our soft, docile, lowland, dairy sheep for hardy, savvy, hill sheep as wild as the hills themselves. It meant learning new (old) ways of working with the land. It meant letting go. Letting go of everything I’d learned over the years of pasture management and soil fertility, all the books I’d read, all the years of restoring life to the old, worn-out silage field we’d inherited on our little, lowland homestead, where building soil, adding back organic fertility for greener pastures and better yields had been the aim of the game. None of that mattered here. Here was only heather and rock and wild, wet meadows of purple moor grass and bog myrtle that didn’t want to be strip-grazed or tilled. Here, the land had given all she had to give and given herself back to the wild.

April 2020, purple moor grass barely greening through its winter thatch.

Why change a thing, then? Why even try to impose our management? I have grappled with those questions. Here was wildness rebounding, delicate and fierce and we tiptoed in, afraid to tread too heavily. Afraid of the footprints we might leave. But I also knew these heaths and grasslands where the hares race and the hen harrier hunts are the result of and depend upon human co-relationship with the land. They are life and place expressed in present form through a dynamic interplay between us, our livestock, climate, and land. I’ll come back to that in part two.

We spent the next two to three years here observing, running our few livestock lightly, unmanaged, through the summer as is the way of these hills. We watched their impacts. How the land responded to our disturbance, the munching and manuring of our livestock. We learned about the land type and its history, our soils and what grows here, what wants to grow here, or doesn’t. We observed neighbouring farmers—noticed what to do and what not to do. And slowly, we began to manage our impacts more intentionally. We made mistakes. We blundered. Our goats ate the holly trees and our sheep ate the baby oaks that popped up on the heath and all the saplings we planted and all the new pastures we tried to establish, and so we slowed down, reassessed with another year’s lessons from the land learned, and tried again.

And I’m still learning, always, with every season and every blunder, from this land that is sensitive and unforgiving and continually reminds me that I know nothing. I am nothing. I’m just figuring it all out as I go in a continual loop of observation, adjustment and adaptation. I’m not telling you why or how any of it should be done. I’m just telling a story. An ongoing, never-ending story of land and learning to live in right relationship with it. This land will not be tamed; she teaches us to work with the wild.