Kentmere

The Kentmere Horseshoe

This is a story about a Flying Squad officer (‘The Sweeney’), a hill farmer (‘Bo’) and a genealogist (‘Charles’). I met them in Kentmere near Ambleside, a remote part of Lakeland landscape, whilst I was fell walking with a buddy. The three individuals didn’t know each other, they most likely never will. Nevertheless, for one day they were connected to us by a shared passion for a piece of landscape that is under threat.

The Sweeney (he even looked like Inspector Jack Regan/John Thaw) was 79. He told us it was his birthday. He looked more like 89, as he gasped for breath and wheezed alarmingly. As we descended and he ascended a hill called Froswick, a western flank of the Kentmere Horseshoe, we had stopped to say hello. When he recovered a little we spoke the usual pleasantries with a fellow tramper – the sort of inane but inoffensive comments that roll out; “Great day for it”, “beats working” and “makes you feel good to be alive”, although saying the last we may have been presumptuous for The Sweeney who looked like he may peg it at any moment. But when we asked him where he was walking to and from, he appeared to relax and told us a little of his past and why he was here. He had retired early from the Squad (I calculated when he was 54) after a career “you don’t want to know about, it was a terrible time…the corruption, the graft…oh, I could shock you with what I saw and had to put up with. I got out the earliest I could. I witnessed terrible things. Walking these hills helps me forget”. Clearly he finds refuge and peace in his life on the Lakeland Fells. Before we left him he offered us some foul looking cake, which we declined graciously. We hoped he would recover enough from his exertions before continuing his climb.

As we walked along the base of the valley we suddenly became aware of a sheepdog darting up and down the fell side. It was making a bit of a hash of controlling a small number of old ewes. Looking like Bo from The Dukes of Hazzard, a strapping young farmer astride a quad bike was in pursuit of his pup and plainly unimpressed with its efforts; his language was colourful to put it politely. After five minutes the canine had completed the required placement of ewes in a field corner near our track. We were able to say hello to Bo who appeared more than happy for a chat and a break from his work. Bo is a second-generation hill-farmer renting his land in Kentmere from The National Trust. He used to maintain a flock of Swaledale sheep but now only keeps Herdwicks. He is ‘paid’ by the Trust and English Nature to reduce the size of his flock by half. See, the Trust and EN want to rewild parts of the valleys and they reckon the best way to achieve this is to incentivise Bo, with NT members’ subscriptions, to dwindle the size of his flocks and thus the amount of land he needs for grazing. Only, I don’t believe most Trust members are aware of this and its consequences.

 Bring us some Swaledales

There are around eighty-five indigenous breeds of sheep in the UK, more than in any other country. Many of these breeds originated in Wales and the north of England centuries ago. They are part of their local landscape and fulfil a vital part in a regional economy for their wool, their milk or their meat. The Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology, in a 2016 POSTNote, declared, “rewilding can benefit both wildlife and local people, but animal reintroductions could adversely affect some land-users”. It goes on to say, “UK landscapes have been managed to produce food and wood for millennia, and 70% of land is currently farmed” but there are folk who believe rewilding policy is “poorly defined and may result in people being excluded from natural spaces”. I am with those folk. Our island is too small to exclude people from any part that is accessible.

When Bo’s father died some years back the Trust offered Bo a new 10-year lease that came with all sorts of dubious incentives but Bo believed he could be out on his ear when the decade was up. Bo wanted to protect his position and provide an on-going life for his children, who will be the third generation to rent and farm this beautiful land. Bo had remembered the old law of tenancy that states a family could occupy a farm for three generations without being forced to leave. After a long tussle with Trust bureaucrats Bo won his fight. This was good news.

“Who else could look after the 25 miles of dry stone walls on this farm?” said Bo. “Maintaining the walls takes up more time than anything else we do. If I wasn’t here – and I’m showing my kids – no other booger is going to know how it’s done. They don’t teach it down at ‘t college.” He has a point. The walls, the grazed fell tops and the farmhouses are part of the makeup of a unique landscape in England. This is a landscape that Bo, the other farmers and tens of thousands of visitors do not wish to see changed. I will come to why not after we meet Charles, the genealogist.

Of the three characters we met in Kentmere that day Charles, (likely not his real name but he looked like a Charles I know), was the most fleeting of figures in this landscape. He stopped to ask us how to find the church. We obliged and pointed to a track. “Thanks. Looking for my ancestors, buried here”, were the only words we got out of him. Yet Charles is another person for whom the Lakeland landscape is important. It provides continuity in his life, a remembrance of lives past and a link to his family heritage. He clearly values this place greatly having made a pilgrimage to this out of the way community miles from the city from where he had journeyed. (His style of dress and car number plate gave away a southern city gent.)

I have written about the sense of isolation and separateness of the Blencathra landscape twenty miles to the north of here.The Kentmere Horseshoe of fells is a living and vibrant monument to how this northern English landscape has thrived and should be left alone. It has provided a rewarding life for generations of farmers, (and therefore jobs); wild and open spaces for pursuers of simple and quiet leisure like me; and a poignant reminder that not everything about industrialisation and ‘globalisation’ is good. It has also, joyously, provided inspiration for successful romantic writers and poets (many high on opium) whose works still delight readers today   At the very least, this landscape’s management should be in the hands of people like Bo and James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd’s Life, a fourth-generation hill farmer who bemoans “outcomers” whose wish for “the future of our landscape would be tourism and wildlife and trees and wilding”. There it is again, that worrying word wilding.

The National Trust and Natural England may well think that they know best when managing the Cumbrian landscape, large tracts of which the Trust owns. Over my recent visits to the fells I have talked to a good number of farmers, (some but not all are tenants of the NT), and none support the Trusts practices of landscape management. That may be partly due to the Trust not being on hand to defend itself and explain its plans. The invisible bogeyman sits in his lair in the capital. If the Trust were to decentralise and allow the locals to sit on a regional management team then arguments and points of view would be likely balanced. Until that happens, most letters to the broadsheet newspapers will continue to support the Cumbrian farmers’ views.

In the years following Brexit, (assuming it happens; the week I write this there appears some doubt), it is clear to me and many other folk that we shall need to be more self-sufficient in food and clothing production. For environmental reasons alone our food and drink should be produced nearer to the market that consumes it. The same applies to all countries across the globe. European hunter gathers in the sixth century BC and early settlers on the land cultivating crops knew a thing or two of the value of proximate food. After them trade, ambition, greed, wars and famines caused mankind to export food. Now look where it has landed us. Despite many advantages of world trade, when you see the oceans of plastic and poisoned fish stocks, I begin to think the outcome is looking bleak. Furthermore first, in the cradle of civilisation, there are the starving Syrians, Yemenis, Eritreans and Somalis. By the twenty first century homo intelligentsia should be doing better.

Walkers, farmer and relative – all met on a single day in Kentmere – have the same beliefs. We want to see the sheep on the fells, we want to see the dry stonewalls and we want to see wide-open spaces in the valleys. This is not to say we want to maintain the fells and valleys as a static museum to a glorious past. Starting around 6000BC Britain became an ever more crowded island. Some current day environmentalists and writers want to rewild Lakeland, taking it back to before man farmed sheep. We cannot nor should do that. We cannot erase the legacy of eight millennia of human occupation and adoption of the British landscape. It has been an amazing and hugely successful enterprise. Yet, we shall need every sheep we can give space to, and they do take up a lot of space on land that cannot sustain crops. For 4,000 years uplands of Great Britain have been used for summer pasturing of sheep. There is no need to change this.

Bureaucrats in London should not mess with the fells and valleys of Lakeland. Any car passenger travelling up and down England can see acres of derelict land besides railways, disused coalmines and closed power stations. If the nation’s inhabitants want ‘rewilding’ there are oodles of acres in which the scientists can practise their schemes. The steady decline in the numbers and species of butterflies in Britain is due neither to land management errors nor pollution in Lakeland. It is the result of nineteenth and twentieth century industrialisation in the cities. The locations in which to restore populations of wild species are surely nearer to where the people (who want to see these fauna) are living. Rewild Doncaster and Swindon, not Kentmere.

South from Harter Fell

If you would like to share your experiences of any of the landscapes discussed in this blog please record them in the Comments section.