5 Nature Reserves
Places of peace, havens of delight
In a world that so often seems to confuse the shadow with the substance, nature reserves are easily taken for granted. Today’s culture values the new and sensational, but neglects things of solid, permanent worth. So let’s say it. It may sound corny, but nature reserves are the greatest achievement of half a century of nature conservation in Britain. The reason is simple. It is only on land specifically set aside for it that nature comes first. There are other forms of protective designation, but in practice all of them entail a compromise between conservation and production. Nature reserves are different. We may need to borrow traditional forms of land husbandry to maintain habitats in their desired state, we may misunderstand things and make terrible mistakes, but on reserves it is wildlife that are the stakeholders, we the onlookers. We have been remarkably successful at preserving the best examples of natural habitats as nature reserves. Of the 284 places in Britain and Ireland identified in 1915 by Charles Rothschild and his helpers as the ‘best spots’, getting on for half are now nature reserves of some sort – a proportion that would probably have amazed Rothschild himself. All of Britain’s wild diversity is represented in the nature reserve series: pristine limestone pavements, wild moors and mountain tops, fern-fringed Atlantic woods (Britain’s rain forest), heaths and commons that have never been ploughed, wild estuaries and islands teeming with birds. A large proportion of our rarest plants and insects occur in nature reserves; some are almost restricted to them.
The acquisition of a network of over 200 National Nature Reserves and ten times that many other nature reserves has absorbed much of the time and energy of conservation bodies since 1950. The need for them is stated constantly in conservation literature. Wild places are under threat through technology-aided human progress. Naturally we all want to preserve the best of what remains. Some commentators have discerned more anthro-pocentric motives that may operate at a half-conscious level. In his perceptive study of nature conservation, The Common Ground, Richard Mabey saw something deeper in our zeal for nature reserves – in ‘the planning, the fund-raising, the planting and building, the digging of ponds, the erecting of nest-barrels, the officiation by wardens, the public gatherings and the private vigils’ (Mabey 1980). In all this frenetic activity is there not ‘something sacramental…a kind of temple-building (albeit to some very fleshly and familiar spirits)? We make these sanctuaries as acts of celebration and charitableness…We are preserving something in ourselves as much as in the outside world’. There are some who would snort at such notions, but that the appeal of nature reserves goes beyond purely scientific considerations is undeniable. Even the unsentimental scientists that sat on the founding Wild Life Conservation Special Committee in 1947 recognised their ‘cultural value’ and compared them with ancient monuments and national museums, that is, as artefacts of the human spirit as well as a means to a desired end.
I have been lucky enough to have seen a lot of National Nature Reserves. My earliest memory of practical conservation work was cutting the invading sycamores and banging in fence posts at Yarner Wood in Devon. I later took part in some scientific monitoring of woodland vegetation at Wistman’s Wood, that curious collection of dwarf oaks in the middle of Dartmoor, and investigating the life cycle of rare flowers high on the bleak fells of Upper Teesdale. In the late 1970s I found myself working for the Nature Conservancy Council in north-east Scotland as one of the team that looked after some wonderful wild places – the Sands of Forvie, that great duneland wilderness by the mouth of the Ythan, the Muir of Dinnet with its bearberry moors and pair of lily-studded lochs, the alpine Morrone Birkwood, and one of the great native pine woods, at Glen Tanar. My formal job was drafting their respective management plans, but I found myself so much in love with them that one of these plans turned into a publication, The Muir of Dinnet. Portrait of a National Nature Reserve (Marren 1979), and I helped organise seminars and edit collections of papers on two more, St Cyrus and Glen Tanar. Had I stayed there, I would probably have written a lyrical tome about the grand, wild, nature reserves of Scotland. As it was, I moved south and, in 1993, wrote a book about England’s instead, about generally softer landscapes where the sound of larks and water birds was often drowned by a chugging tractor trailing a cutting machine or weed-wipe, or a dredger squirting out accumulating mud from the bottom of a lake.
Nature reserves come in all kinds of guises, from unique one-offs, such as the bouncing bog or schwingmoor at Chartley Moss in Staffordshire, or the isolated limestone hill at Stanner Rocks in Powys with its own suite of wild flowers, to places more typical of the wild landscape, such as the chalk downs at Wye, with their rare orchids and moths, or the series of pristine bogs at Silver Flowe in Galloway, a place whose very name has magic. If you live in the lowlands, nature reserves may come to mean relatively small places, often run by the local authority or the county wildlife trust. However, to see National Nature Reserves at their best and as they were originally envisaged, do visit some of the bigger, wilder ones, such as Invernaver or Inchnadamph in Sutherland, Beinn Eighe in Wester Ross, Roudsea Woods and Mosses in Cumbria, the cluster of Atlantic oak woods in Snowdonia National Park, the pine woods at Abernethy in Speyside or the Lizard Heaths in Cornwall. These places are important because they are big enough to support a high natural biodiversity, and have the human resources to ensure they are looked after properly without compromising their natural character.
If we lived in a pre-industrial society in which farming and wildlife existed in harmony, we might not need nature reserves at all. In today’s circumstances we do. Beyond question, many a pleasant down or heath would now be a field of rippling wheat or gloomy plantations of spruce if someone had not had the foresight to acquire them with the intention of leaving them as they are – beautiful, wild and transcending mere commodity value.
Highland fastness: Traligill Burn and Conival in Inchnadamph National Nature Reserve, Sutherland. (Derek Ratcliffe)
A short review of our nature reserves
For many, nature reserves are the embodiment of nature conservation in practice. They secure, for choice areas, a security of tenure under a form of management that benefits wildlife and preserves diversity. Nature reserves do not necessarily have to be set apart exclusively for wildlife. Many continue to be grazed by livestock, and not a few provide products for sale, from firewood and barbecue charcoal to premium quality hay or thatching reed. A few look the way farmland used to be – meadows, hedges, even cornfields. However, few, if any, British nature reserves provide enough rents or sales to pay for their upkeep. Admission is free for all but a few, like Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire. It could hardly be otherwise with rights of way running through many of them. Instead, nature reserve maintenance is funded mainly by grants and carried out partly in-house, partly by volunteers, partly by contractors. Large capital grants often come from the Heritage Lottery Fund and conservation agencies, while many reserves are acquired by appeals, or by grant-aid from the nature conservation agenices or the local authority. One way or another, they are paid for by public funds.
What is the oldest nature reserve in Britain? Probably the private one set up by the Yorkshire squire and explorer, Charles Waterton, in 1821. The oldest formal one is the bird sanctuary at Breydon Water in Norfolk, purchased by a local society and declared a bird reserve in 1888. The earliest to protect a natural habitat is probably Wicken Fen, the first few acres of which were purchased by Charles Rothschild in 1899 and handed over to the National Trust for safekeeping. But although nature reserves are relatively recent arrivals on the rural scene, the idea of setting land aside for wild animals is almost as old as history. From Norman times, large areas of relatively wild country were preserved under special laws designed to safeguard wild deer and other game. However unjust and corrupt forest law might have been, it certainly preserved many areas of woodland and heath, most notably, of course, in the New Forest, where the system, in modified form, survives to this day. Another characteristic British habitat, the deer park full of ancient trees, is also the product of aristocratic fashion. Though maintained as status symbols, some were also nature reserves in all but name. Commons, relicts of peasant agriculture, are another godsend for wildlife. We owe more to pre-conservation ages than is sometimes admitted. Nature reserves are sometimes only the latest manifestation of a long conservation history.
Most nature reserves are designed, naturally enough, to protect wildlife habitats. But a large minority are run by special interest bodies, such as the RSPB, the Wildfowl Trust or Butterfly Conservation, and managed in the interests of their client groups. Some habitats, such as limestone grassland and lowland heath, have a disproportionate number of nature reserves. This is partly because they are rich in rare species, but also because they are passing out of the economic system, and hence are under threat. Today, about the only conceivable future for habitats such as heaths and peat bogs is under some form of protective agreement, of which freehold ownership by a conservation body is the safest. Other reasons for acquiring land as nature reserves are to save it from imminent destruction, to protect rare species (especially birds, orchids and butterflies), to secure undisturbed areas for ecological experiments, and sheer sentiment. As Richard Mabey (1980) shrewdly observed, the act of creating them can seem as important as their effectiveness. Acquiring a nature reserve looks like an achievement, but it will come to naught unless the place is looked after properly.
Who looks after nature reserves in Britain? Acquiring a nationwide network of National Nature Reserves (NNRs), representing the best examples of natural habitats and geological formations, was one of the core tasks of the Nature Conservancy, set up in 1949. Over the next 21 years, the Conservancy acquired over 100 NNRs. Some were test-beds for long-term research and experiments in scientific management in the 1960s; some became well known, nationally and internationally, and were much visited by foreign scientists setting up their own nature conservation institutions. It probably helped that, by chance, so many NNRs had such memorable names: Castor Hanglands, Kingley Vale, Rodney Stoke, Tregaron Bog, Braunton Burrows, Craigellachie, as well as a gaggle of Welsh Coeds and Cwms (I can still hear Morton Boyd describing ‘the jewels in our crown from Caerlaverock to Muckle Flugga!’). They were famous once; Sir Fred Holliday claimed that the name Monks Wood resounded around the world, and everyone in ecology and conservation circles knew at least the names of Moor House, Upper Teesdale and Rum (formerly spelt Rhum). Each of the older ones has a scientific and conservation history, and I maintain that you can learn more about nature conservation in practice from the story of a single nature reserve than from a whole shelf of the latest agendas and strategies. The portfolio of NNRs has grown since 1970 to nearly 300 (200 in England alone), but although they do their job as well as – and, as far as management is concerned, better than – they did in the past, they seem to have lost their onetime significance. From being newsworthy and exciting, they have gradually moved to the margins of things.
Nature reserves are also run by local authorities. Some of the wild green spaces in and around London, such as Wimbledon Common, Richmond Park, Burnham Beeches and Epping Forest were the product of a far-sighted realisation that Londoners needed nearby havens of calm and beauty. The authorities had the good sense to preserve at least some of their natural character. Powers to designate ‘Local Nature Reserves’ (LNRs) were given to all local authorities in 1949. After a promising start, when wild seaside places such as Gibraltar Point, Ravenglass Dunes and Aberlady Bay were designated as LNRs, most local authorities found they had more urgent priorities. Local Nature Reserves did not really take off until nature conservation entered the mainstream national agenda in the 1990s. By 1998, however, there were 598 LNRs covering 29,032 hectares, representing more than a doubling by number since 1991. Most are in densely populated areas and are managed as public amenities. Some are SSSIs, and a few, such as Castle Eden Dene, Chobham Common and Kenfig Burrows have even been made National Nature Reserves. The first nature reserve to be run by a parish council, Coppice Leasowes in Shropshire, was designated in 1999. Country Parks are another form of rural amenity run by local authorities since 1968, which in some cases are de facto nature reserves. A well-known example is Sherwood Forest, an SSSI-designated fragment of old forest containing 600 ‘veteran’ oak trees, some of which might have sheltered Robin Hood.
Part of Wye National Nature Reserve in Kent: the deep chalk coombe known as the Devil’s Kneading-trough. (Natural Image/Bob Gibbons)
Another idea dating from 1949 was the Forest Nature Reserve (FNRs), which could be set up by agreement between the Conservancy and the Forestry Commission or another Crown body. They did not achieve very much. At Bernwood Forest near Oxford, some marginal areas were left for rare butterflies, but nature reserve status did not spare the rest from normal forestry practice, which in the 1960s meant clear-felling most of the wood and restocking it with conifers. Among the Forest Nature Reserves, however, is a very important one – Lady Park Wood in the Wye Valley, possibly the wildest wood in England. Exceptionally, it has been left to develop naturally – though not without a struggle with the FC, which, as usual, wanted to cut down the oldest trees to encourage regeneration. Scientists have learned more about natural woodland from studying Lady Park Wood than from any number of managed nature reserves. The concept of FNRs was revived in 1988 by the Forestry Commission, mainly for native pine woods in its ownership (they are now called Caledonian Forest Reserves).
Lady Park Wood NNR in the Wye Valley – near natural woodland preserved unman-aged for ecological study. (Derek Ratcliffe)
Another form of nature reserve was the statutory bird sanctuary, created by the Home Secretary after consulting the local authority. Most were on estuaries or other soft shores used by wildfowl and waders, such as the Ribble, the Humber or Caerlaverock on the Solway. Designation did not involve a change in ownership. The main purpose was to protect the roosting grounds of geese and other birds by a voluntary ban on shooting. The Wildfowl Trust also retained the word ‘sanctuary’ for its small but significant network of wetland nature reserves in Britain and Ireland (see Chapter 3).
The majority of nature reserves in Britain are run by voluntary conservation bodies, most notably the county wildlife trusts and the RSPB. A number of National Trust and National Trust for Scotland properties are also managed as nature reserves, either by name or in practice. Between them, the voluntary bodies now look after getting on for 3,000 nature reserves, ranging from large, famous places such as the Nene Washes and Dungeness to pocket-handkerchief reserves of less than a hectare. County trust reserves were often run on a shoestring, but, at least for those of SSSI status, much greater resources became available in the 1990s through agency and lottery grants and tax credits. The RSPB’s reserves are larger on average and have better facilities, including trails and hides. Some such as Minsmere, Abernethy and the Insh Marshes are the equal of any National Nature Reserve. In the early days the RSPB did a lot of digging to create ‘scrapes’ and ponds for water birds. Today their purpose has broadened and they are managed for wildlife in general – if still birds in particular. The management of nature reserves designated as SSSIs must be agreed by the country agency, and this has achieved a kind of standardisation. Today, it matters less and less who runs a nature reserve, so long as the resources are there and the managers know what they are doing.
What do we hope to achieve by having nature reserves? Broadly speaking, of course, the aim is the protection of wildlife, but the ways in which the reserves support that aim are surprisingly varied. In the very early days, the accent was on pure protection. Nature reserves protected birds from being shot or otherwise disturbed, or wild flowers and butterflies from being collected. The main need was therefore for a fence and keep out sign (for the previous New Naturalist volume on nature conservation, the jacket designers incorporated a huge red no-entry sign). Unfortunately, simply fencing a site is counter-productive, for it often denies it the use that sustained it. The classic example is at Badgeworth in Gloucestershire, a pocket-handkerchief nature reserve fenced in to protect that very rare buttercup relative, the adder’s-tongue spearwort. Inside the fence, the ungrazed vegetation grew tall and rank, and the spearworts temporarily disappeared. What they really needed was not fences but cows. The only places where unmodified protectionism actually works is on the seashore or a few mountain tops, cliffs and ravines. Practically everywhere else depends on livestock grazing (on heaths burning was a bad substitute) or forms of wild harvest, such as coppicing and hay-cropping.
The architects of the National Nature Reserves realised that natural vegetation is dynamic, and that habitats need maintenance. To develop techniques in wildlife management, the Nature Conservancy acquired a few properties that were representative rather than outstanding, such as Moor House in the North Pennines or Monks Wood in what was then Huntingdonshire. They were intended to be ‘outdoor laboratories’ for experiments in grazing and tree planting (hence these places, at least, had to be owned to provide security for long-term experiments). As nature reserves, their value has increased over time. Moor House now contains the only unshot, unmanaged grouse moor in England. Some 400 scientific papers have been based on this particular outdoor laboratory, on subjects varying from vegetation production and geology to climate monitoring and tree establishment. In 1991 it was chosen as a ‘lead site’ for the Environmental Change Network, for remote monitoring of global warming and atmospheric chemistry. Moor House and Monks Wood are perhaps Britain’s best known scientific nature reserves. But the people that set them up in the 1950s would have been disappointed there were so few of them.
An experimental plot high on the North Pennine fells at Moor House NNR. (Derek Ratcliffe)
Most nature reserves have the more direct aim of conserving and, if possible, enhancing whatever is inside them. Their management has generally been aimed at maintaining diversity, through a mosaic of habitats or a series of ‘management zones’, and habitat quality, achieved by a combination of grazing, mowing and cropping. Scrub-cutting is often necessary to prevent heaths or downs from turning into thickets, and regular coppicing preserves the open structure of a wood so necessary for carpets of wild flowers and visiting insects. However, until the 1980s, probably most nature reserves were under-managed. The development of ‘recipe’ handbooks for habitat management retrieved the situation a little, but what really saved the situation was more money, through agency enhancement schemes for nature reserves of SSSI quality, and the sudden fall of manna from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Improved technology also made a big difference, such as broad-wheeled vehicles that could cross a peat bog without leaving a mark, and powerful tractors capable of towing a variety of swipes and mowers through rough country. On wetlands, wildlife managers became adept at channelling water using sluices, pipes and dams. On the Broads, 20-tonne JCBs excavated ponds to recreate lost habitats for fen orchids and stoneworts; indeed JCBs have now become part of the conservation armoury, along with the universal four-wheel quad-bike (didn’t someone declare there is little in the English countryside that cannot be improved by the creative use of a JCB?). All this investment, along with a new determination to tackle invasive herbage such as bracken and gorse, has made it possible to undo decades of neglect. The NCC and its successors tackled square miles of thicket using swipes, non-persistent herbicides and the full might of late twentieth-century hydraulic power. Before myxomatosis, Lullington Heath in East Sussex contained the biggest and best example of chalk heath, a rare and unusual habitat in which heather and other plants of dry, acid soil alternate with lime-loving plants such as wild thyme and rockrose. Unfortunately, having acquired it by lease from a water company in 1955, the Nature Conservancy was refused permission to introduce sheep to replace the lost rabbits in case they contaminated Eastbourne’s water supply. By the time the company changed its mind, most of Lullington Heath had scrubbed over. Today, after an epic struggle led by tracked vehicles with hydraulic buckets, much of the reserve is once again open grassland and heath, maintained by grazing and mowing. Places like Lullington Heath have value not only in what they are, but by showing that, however hopeless it may look at first, restoration is possible. In the 1990s and today a struggle on a grander scale is underway to tackle invasive scrub on southern heathlands (‘Tomorrow’s Heathland Heritage’). The aim is to double the amount of open heath over the next 20 years. In Wales, the conservation bodies are faced by an even more difficult problem: invasive rhododendron – more difficult, because rhododendron toxins sterilise the soil, requiring surface treatment as well as chain saws and bonfires.
Lullington Heath NNR in East Sussex, a rare example of ‘chalk heath’ reclaimed from scrub and tangle by nature reserve managers using chain saws and hydraulic diggers. (Natural Image/Bob Gibbons)
Hence, the practical management of nature reserves has changed over the years from almost none to a level that in some cases is comparable with a park or wild garden. Some argue that the pendulum has swung a little too far, and that it can be hard to find wilderness on English nature reserves; management is too conspicuous, man’s imprint too obvious. There should be places that we simply leave alone, for better or worse. In Scotland, the retention of wilderness seems a more conscious aim. Of course, much of the burst of management on England’s National Nature Reserves from the 1980s was aimed at undoing the neglect of previous decades, or the activities of the previous owner.
How are nature reserves selected? Before 1970, even National Nature Reserves were acquired in an ad hoc way, though most of them were recognised as being in some way special for wildlife. By 1965 the Treasury had started asking awkward questions. How many nationally important sites were there? How many nature reserves were needed to complete the series? How much would it all cost? The Nature Conservancy had no ready answer, and so it embarked on a project to provide a factual basis for nature reserve acquisition that could be defended scientifically. Under Derek Ratcliffe’s leadership, this ‘reserves review’ became a fundamental review of Britain’s wildlife resources that identified 735 ‘key sites’ on a range of criteria, including size, rarity, representativeness and ‘naturalness’. This was the Nature Conservation Review. By the time it was published, in 1977, however, the review had been decoupled from its original purpose as a shopping list. The Government never did get a direct answer to what might have seemed simple and logical questions. Each new reserve is justified on its merits, as before. There are, in practice, only two tiers of nature reserves – those that are designated SSSIs (or SACs) and the rest.
Why some nature reserves are better than others
Older nature reserves are generally better than recent ones. Their wardens or managers have had time to get to grips with the place, and to see the fruits of their labours. Big reserves are better than small ones. They are more stable, have more wildlife and are more cost-effective. Fortunately it has sometimes been possible to link several small reserves and quasireserves and manage them as a unit (see below). Nature reserve management has improved over the years. In the early days, a warden might spend a lot of time fiddling about by planting trees or marram grass, or seeing off poachers. Today we think we have a better idea of what we need to do to benefit wildlife, and have developed the technical skills to do it. Even so, it is surprising how much nature reserves continue to reflect fads and fashions in conservation, rather than the unchanging bedrock of some scientific imperative.
Morrone Birkwood near Braemar, a rare alpine birch wood with an understorey of juniper and a rich flora dependent on base-rich flushes and rills. Recently ‘struck off’ as a nature reserve because of differences between SNH and the private owner.
Some have argued that, as an idea, nature reserves, good or bad, big or small, are conceptually flawed. ‘Reserving’ land for a quality that is in fact universal threatens to reduce nature to the status of a resource or tribe. In confinement, nature is apt to be treated with less than awe, farmed pragmatically as one crops a field of carrots. For a nature reserve to be successful implies an acceptance that conservation outside the reserve will be unsuccessful (if not, who needs a nature reserve?). By their existence, therefore, they reinforce a polarity between the protected countryside and the rest. Not all wildlife can be accommodated by nature reserves anyway. While they can support rare, relatively non-mobile species, such as a pasqueflower or an Adonis blue, there is little they can do to prevent the decline of widespread species, such as skylarks or harvest mice, or wide-ranging ones such as golden eagles or otters. Nature reserves exist partly because they are places where we can do something, immediately and on home ground. They give us something tangible to show for our efforts. They also exist because conservation bodies exist. Apart from purely campaigning bodies such as WWF, everybody seems to want a portfolio of nature reserves to show off. They are more solid than a policy, more permanent than a pamphlet. And they offer a service to the membership.
Conservation bodies do not always own their nature reserves. Among National Nature Reserves, fewer than a quarter are owned by the country agency; the rest are either leased or managed by agreement with a private owner over a fixed period. It was certainly the intention of the founders of official nature conservation in Britain that the bulk of the national reserves would be purchased. However, the Nature Conservancy’s budget was limited, and not all owners were willing to sell. Furthermore, under the Conservatives in the 1950s, and, periodically, later on, there was political resistance to the Conservancy acquiring too much land lest it be seen as ‘land sterilisation’, and, worse, ‘backdoor nationalisation’ (National Nature Reserves had been conceived of during the postwar reconstruction when nationalisation was all the rage). In practice, NNRs were acquired as opportunity allowed, often by agreement with a private owner. At their worst, these agreements allowed the Conservancy to do little more than put up a sign. While all National Nature Reserves were of ‘national importance for nature conservation’, the management of some of them fell a good way short. By contrast, the RSPB owns most of its reserves, as, increasingly, do the county wildlife trusts. Another trend is for multiple ownership, with a conservation body contributing most, but other parties, notably the local authority, holding a stake.
The National Nature Reserves have (or at least had) more resources than most voluntary bodies can call on, but they are also more subject to outside interference. The unsatisfactory tenure of so many NNRs has been a major limitation on what they can hope to achieve. Some NNR agreements seem to have been made between owner and estate agent over a glass of sherry, without much involvement by scientists. In Scotland, SNH has begun a weeding-out process. Of the 71 NNRs in its care, only 31 met the three necessary qualifications: that nature conservation should be the primary purpose, that they should exemplify the best available standards of management, and be open to the public. Given that SNH owns only 17 of them (it part owns another 17) it is not all that surprising. Some 14 Scottish NNRs have been, or are about to be, ‘de-declared’, that is, struck off, on the grounds that their NNR status has become irrelevant. More rarely, this has happened in England and Wales, too. In 1994, a famous nature reserve, Braunton Burrows in Devon, was struck off after English Nature was prevented from introducing livestock there to prevent scrub invasion. National Nature Reserves have, rather ludicrously, come under political fire from right-wing ideologues opposed to anything with ‘national’ in the name. In 1988, the Environment Minister, Nicholas Ridley, sensing nature reserves might be making life difficult for field sports, ‘invited’ the NCC to consider selling off some of them, and in the meantime put an embargo on further land purchase. Since the NCC owned less than a third of its nature reserves, there was not much to sell. It took refuge in the time-honoured tactic of prevarication. Ridley expressed himself disappointed, but fortunately he was himself removed before the NCC could gauge the extent of his disappointment in its next annual grant. Ridley’s successor, Chris Patten, promptly lifted the embargo, but since then the agencies have been reluctant to take on more National Nature Reserves unless someone else can be found to run them.
Another limitation of nature reserves is that nature is – by its nature, so to speak – not fully under our control. What happens on the ground may not relate very closely to the management plan. Monks Wood NNR offers an object lesson in humility. As the ‘back garden’ to the Nature Conservancy’s field station specialising in nature reserve management, Monks Wood was something of a nature reserve showpiece. Its original management plan, published in book form in 1973 (Steele & Schofield 1973), partitioned the reserve into various ‘management categories’, notably coppice, high forest, glades and ‘non-interference’, each with its own set of prescriptions. This was partly to create a diversity of woodland habitats consistent with the wood’s history, but also to hedge one’s bets; the wood’s scientific managers admitted they were ‘not completely certain that man can manage more effectively than nature’, and were therefore keen to leave parts of the wood to develop naturally. Within the zone earmarked as coppice, the warden planted nursery hazel cuttings, and ‘layered’ existing hazel shoots in a technique familiar to generations of woodmen. Planting was thought to be necessary because grey squirrels were eating most of the hazelnuts; acorns and oak saplings were also planted for the same reason. In the area designated as high forest, trees were thinned and old coppice stools singled to promote stands of tall oak and ash trees. The sides of the main rides were to be cut every eight years to create a fringe of blackthorn, the foodplant of the rare black hairstreak butterfly, and other shrubs. The glades, first formed by wartime potato fields, were cut annually with a tractor and swipe. Hopefully they would fill up with wild flowers.
That is how its managers thought Monks Wood should be. But, in fact, Monks Wood is not like that at all. The plan could not have taken into account Dutch elm disease, which created some wholly unplanned glades, nor the increase in muntjac deer, which created havoc with the coppice plots. Because of the deer, the wood’s primrose paths have been replaced by tussocks of pendulous sedge, which seems to be the only plant the deer will not eat. The high forest developed willy-nilly, not from deliberate management but through the abandonment of it. In effect the whole wood has become ‘non-intervention’, except in the rides and glades, and they have become lawns. If we lose the battle with deer – and we are losing it – Monks Wood may become open and park-like, and all the earlier work will have been in vain (though we may rediscover some virtues in parks). This does not mean that management plans are a waste of time, or that the original Monks Wood one was wrong, only that they are inevitably based on experience and value-judgements made at that particular time. Complete control is an illusion. In practice, nature reserves are shaped not only by planning, but by natural events, such as gales, diseases, rising sea levels and non-native invaders, as well as by financial shortages, changing fashions and different neighbours.
Changing concepts of conservation
Recently the distinction between what is a nature reserve and what is not has become blurred. What sort of sense does it make to call the Cairngorms a nature reserve, but not the New Forest? Areas such as the Stanford Practical Training Area in the Breckland, or Windsor Great Park, contribute as much to nature conservation as any formally named nature reserve. Conversely, some nature reserves contribute little, if anything. Besides, in Britain, man and nature are indivisible. Multi-purpose use – blending amenity, access, conservation and production – or ‘resting’ the land as long-term set-aside, is becoming more characteristic of the modern landscape than sanctuaries set apart for wildlife. As conservation gains ground in national policies, nature reserves tend to lose significance. Some might argue that woodland nature reserves, for example, are no longer necessary, or that ‘nature reserve’ is not the right name for the increasingly large tracts of the Highlands and Islands owned by conservation and heritage bodies. The Woodland Trust does not call its properties nature reserves. Even the RSPB now owns and manages land where the term may not be appropriate.
In truth, ‘nature reserve’ always had a rather vague meaning. As we have seen, reserves cover a range of activities, from ‘quiet enjoyment’ to scientific experiments, biodiversity management and even non-intensive forms of farming and silviculture. In the case of The Wash, the National Nature Reserve label confers not exclusion, but a kind of sustainability plan, a forum in which conflicts can be resolved by discussion and a common strategy worked out. Conceptually, this sort of nature reserve resembles a medieval common more than the idea of a sanctuary set apart from use. In others, such as the Cairngorms, most of the activity is not about safeguarding wildlife in the narrow sense, but in trying to reconcile what Christopher Smout describes as ‘use and delight’ – the contending claims on our wild countryside (Smout 2000).
If one had to define the moment when nature reserves started to lose their traditional meaning, I would choose 1973, when the NCC took over responsibility for the North Meadow at Cricklade in Wiltshire. The original lists of nature reserves were made up of relatively wild places, but North Meadow is just a big field, cut for hay in summer and afterwards grazed by cattle and horses. Fields are first and foremost farm workplaces, and if they are also havens for wildlife, that is incidental. In taking on North Meadow, the NCC was really standing in for the parish stockman, and before him the medieval reeve. The reason it became a National Nature Reserve was North Meadow’s large population of fritillary lilies, but the flowers required no special scientific management, only the slow rhythms of the farming calendar: flooding, mowing, grazing, pollarding and ditching. In harvesting its crop of lilies, the NCC was acknowledging that husbandry is as important as science, and that it is stability within a traditional farming system that sustains a place like North Meadow, Cricklade. It is the measure of the opening gap between agriculture and nature that such places are made nature reserves.
Hope springs eternal. This protected verge, in what is now a housing estate in Thetford, marks a colony of the endangered fingered speedwell.
One could say the same about protected road verges, which form a kind of nationwide linear nature reserve. A network of them has been established, generally on the advice of the county wildlife trust and with the co-operation of the local highway authority. Most are sections of road bank with a particularly rich flora or one or more rare species. The system works best when there is someone nearby to keep an eye on things, such as Eric Simms and the beautiful, flowery verges he looks after at North Witham, Lincolnshire. Unfortunately the local authority sometimes forgets to tell their contractor or interprets protection as meaning no management, with the result that the verges become overgrown. In Cumbria, important verges have been ‘improved’ by farmers to supplement their rye-grass fields. Worse, the protection signs cannot stop eutrophication as the result of traffic fumes or the runoff from fields, which turn flowery waysides into monocultures of stinging nettle or cow parsley. Once again, protected verges are not a sign of ‘wildlife gain’: at their most successful they remind us of what has been lost elsewhere.
An acknowledged defect of Britain’s nature reserves is that most of them are too small. Small reserves are vulnerable to change from surrounding land uses; a small reserve in the middle of an arable field, for example (and there are some), is probably doomed. Moreover small reserves are often awkward to manage. For this reason, it is desirable to link nearby nature reserves with corridors of ‘wildlife-friendly’ countryside wherever possible. For example, a series of nearby sites in the Chilterns of Bedfordshire are now managed as a unity by a forum composed of English Nature, the local wildlife trust, the National Trust and the local authority. At its core lies Barton Hills NNR, but this once isolated reserve is now buffered by a mosaic of set-aside and restored grassland with other ‘oases’ of natural chalk grassland which, with the right encouragement, should gradually expand and perhaps attract target species such as the stone curlew. The National Nature Reserve at Loch Lomond is today part of a wider nature conservation area with the National Trust’s property at Ben Lomond and the RSPB’s reserve at Inversnaid, the ‘bonny banks’. Events there began to move rapidly in the late 1990s, with the opening of Ben Lomond National Memorial Park (allied to Forest Enterprise’s plans to replace blocks of conifers with native trees) and the first tree plantings and woodland restoration work for the Millennium Forest for Scotland at the nearby Cashell estate. This whole area is set to become Scotland’s first National Park. The preservation of its beauty and wildlife is the primary aim, and, because so much of the area is already under protective management, its realisation may be nearer than in most of England’s National Parks.
One of the best-tested examples of land-integration for conservation and amenity is the Sefton Coast, a 27-kilometre curve of wide beaches and high dunes between the Mersey and the Ribble. Though broken by the sprawling towns of Crosby, Formby and Southport, much of this coast is still open and surprisingly wild, despite its proximity to Liverpool and ease of access from road and rail – so accessible, indeed, that they held car races here in the 1930s. More or less fortuitously, the wilder bits came into benign ownership between 1956, when a National Wildfowl Refuge was established at Southport, and 1978, when the integrated Sefton Coast Management Scheme started. The NCC acquired Ainsdale Sand Dunes, and later the Ribble Estuary and Cabin Hill, as National Nature Reserves. The National Trust acquired Formby Point and its famous red squirrels as part of its Enterprise Neptune scheme. Birkdale Sandhills and the nearby Ravensmeols Sandhills are Local Nature Reserves, run by Sefton Metropolitan Council. Together they own some 2,100 hectares of sand dunes, making it the largest protected area of this habitat in England. Moreover, this coast is particularly rich in wildlife, from the croaking chorus of natterjack toads in the spring to a variety of rare plants and insects, such as the sandhill rustic moth and the petalwort, a liverwort resembling a tiny crisp of lettuce.
Mobile dunes at Ainsdale NNR, part of the Sefton Coast conservation scheme. (English Nature/ Peter Wakely)
The Sefton Coast scheme, begun by the local authorities with the backing of the Countryside Commission, but soon joined by other parties such as the NCC and the National Trust, attempts to find solutions to the many problems in keeping this area wild and attractive and yet cater for thousands of visitors. The problems include erosion – much of the sand had been removed by beach-cleaning machines, depriving the dunes of their necessary diet of loose sand – and the spread of scrub, especially sea buckthorn. Successful conservation demands co-operation between neighbours – for example, there is little point in digging ponds for natterjacks if the water is being piped away to a new housing estate. The tendency for the dunes to become overgrown with coarse grass and brambles has been overcome by winter-grazing them with hardy Herdwick sheep from the Lake District. They were introduced first to the National Nature Reserve, and, after signs of success there, are being used more widely as ‘woolly mowers’. Some residents now consider there is too much management, and that in particular the shelterbelts of pine taking up space for perfectly good sand dunes should be left alone. Since the 1990s, the Sefton Coast scheme has been underpinned by candidate SAC status covering much of the area, and hence Euro-funding is available for an integrated nature conservation strategy. Its success owes much to an early start and to the broadly compatible aims of the main players. Integrated conservation areas like the Sefton Coast point towards a new, twenty-first-century role for nature reserves: as core areas of wild nature within multi-purpose ‘parks’ managed for outdoor recreation and tourism.
Wardening
The peculiarity of Britain’s landscape is that practically all of it has an agricultural or silvicultural history. We are constantly told that Britain has no virgin wilderness comparable to, say Yellowstone or Serengeti. Even our wildest, remotest places, such as the blanket bogs of northern Scotland or the Cairngorms plateau, have been grazed by sheep or deer, scorched by fire or polluted from the air. Interestingly, when land becomes neglected and grows wild the wildlife value does not necessarily go up. Indeed, in formerly stable, traditionally managed landscapes, such as water-meadows or chalk hills, it goes down with a bump. Scrub has its value, but it is generally lower in biodiversity and less heterogeneous than the ancient grassland or heath it displaced. A farmed meadow such as North Meadow, Cricklade, manured, cut for hay and after-grazed by horses and cows, will contain more wild flowers than one which is ring-fenced, called a nature reserve, and left alone. The challenge faced by nature reserve managers in the 1950s and 60s was in maintaining this inheritance of wildlife without the benefit of a reaper or shepherd, or a skilled woodman.
From the start, all National Nature Reserves had a warden. Sometimes the warden lived on the reserve in a tied house, but, as more and more NNRs were set up, he was often given several reserves to look after. The first generation of wardens were often from a background in forestry, gamekeeping or estate work. Several were retired servicemen (resourceful, self-disciplined, cool under fire). Traditionally, wardens divided their time between recording and monitoring wildlife, and care and maintenance: repairing fences and bridges, filling in potholes in the track, building culverts and dams. In the Cairngorms area, they shot deer and brought the carcasses down from the hill on the back of a pony. At Beinn Eighe, the warden spent much of his time trying to catch deer poachers. The first generation of wardens did a surprising amount of planting, of trees or marram grass. They also helped the scientists to carry out their experiments, which generally meant putting up more fences to keep animals out, or, alternatively, in. One ex-keeper inherited from the previous estate ‘couldn’t abide the sight of boggy ground, and took a disproportionate delight in digging small drainage schemes’ (Boyd 1999).
Management activities on nature reserves are based on a management plan, which, in the NCC, was traditionally written by a scientist. Its purpose is to make a clear statement about what the reserve was for, to set management objectives within a time frame, and to focus resources in the most efficient and cost-effective way. A standard plan covers the next five or ten years in detail, while setting out broad aims and detailed tasks. In many cases, especially in low-maintenance places such as offshore islets or peat bogs, the aim is to keep the place more or less as it is. However, that does not necessarily imply lack of activity. Seabirds must be monitored, bogs need firebreaks and systems of water control, grassland needs a grazer. Just maintaining the status quo might entail a perpetual battle with birch, bracken and rhododendron. Such tasks were routinely itemised in the last section of the plan, called ‘Prescriptions’, following an analysis of the nature of the site and potential threats to its wellbeing.
Field study at Lathkill Dale, part of the Derbyshire Dales NNR. (English Nature/ Peter Wakely)
Perhaps the greatest effort of all has gone into restoring peat bogs. From the late 1980s, the NCC and its successors inherited a large acreage of peat bogs devastated by mechanised peat cutting as a result of a controversial deal with Fisons. Since peat bogs are a living resource, formed by the bog-moss Sphagnum’s unusual ability to grow indefinitely and retain water like a sponge, even devastated bogs are renewable – providing they are wet enough. To ensure this the agencies embarked on a marathon exercise in dam-building to prevent the precious water from draining away. An object lesson in what happens to bogs when it does drain away is the National Nature Reserve at Thorne Moors, where fire took hold in August 1989 and consumed some 405 hectares of crumbling peat before it could be brought under control. Damming ditches with peat is a low-tech activity that takes a long time. By 1997, English Nature had built hundreds of dams at Thorne Moors, with the help of a wide-track Hymac excavator borrowed from the peat-diggers. Along with this work it has had to control invading bracken and birch scrub, which sucks water out of the peat almost as surely as a ditch drains it. Once the bog is sufficiently wet again, the scrub invasion should come to a natural stop. However, bogs must not be made too wet too quickly in case the natural acidity of the peat is softened by silt, which turns it into a fen. This has become a problem at Woodwalton Fen, where there is now plenty of water, but not pure water, as in the original fen, but water polluted with agricultural chemicals. For the same reason, it is considered unwise to build bonfires on very acid bogs in case the ash fertilises the peat. Altogether, restoring peat bogs requires a lot of care and patience, and is probably impractical unless the site is already a nature reserve, complete with an experienced person on the spot, such as Frank Mawby at Glasson Moss, or Peter Roworth at Thorne Moor, or Joan Daniels at the Shropshire mires.
Trust reserves
National Nature Reserves are chosen on scientific grounds as the best examples of wild habitats, in terms of size, naturalness and biodiversity. Almost by definition they are exceptional places. Many of the nature reserves run by the county wildlife trusts, on the other hand, sound like that place you know just down the lane. Among those run by the Kent Wildlife Trust is the bank near his home where Darwin studied wild orchids (‘Downe Bank’) and the wild garden of the astronomer Sir John Herschel. Others include a storage reservoir constructed in the 1960s that now attracts migratory birds and nesting little ringed plovers, a dump of chalk spoil that has since become another wild garden, and a mine that once produced Kentish ragstone and is now home to several species of bat. The very names of trust reserves seem ingrained in the landscape: The Mens, Chickengrove Bottom, Avery’s Pightle, Dancers End, Oxey Mead, Coulters Dean. While a few cover 100 or more hectares, more are between one and 20 hectares: a stretch of bank too steep to plough, an overgrown common the trust has agreed to take over (in the absence of any remaining active commoners), or a wooded dingle above the remains of an old tramway.
Whether or not they are considered to be of SSSI quality, trust reserves often express the local character of the landscape, and are well-loved places to those who know them. An ‘average’ county might be Dorset, which has 22 wildlife trust reserves covering 760 hectares – which represents only 10 per cent of conservation and heritage land in the county, though more than half of its nature reserves. The jewel in the crown’ – most counties have one – is the Kingcombe Estate, 152 hectares of traditional meadows, permanent pasture and woods with a field studies centre near Maiden Newtown. Another fine reserve, Powerstock Common, lies nearby. The Dorset Wildlife Trust has attempted to acquire examples of all the main natural habitats in the county, notably woodland (Bracket’s Coppice 23 hectares), chalk grassland (Townsend 16 hectares), heathland (Winfrith Heath 103 hectares), fen (East Stoke 5 hectares) and meadow (Loscombe 10 hectares). Other nature reserve owners and managers in the county are English Nature (1,909 hectares), National Trust (5,500 hectares), RSPB (881 hectares), Woodland Trust (157 hectares), Plantlife (15 hectares) and several local authorities (383 hectares). With its beautiful wild coastline and extensive heathland, Dorset has a disproportionate number of National Nature Reserves and National Trust properties, but even so, if you live in that county the chances are that your backdoor nature reserve will belong to the Dorset Wildlife Trust.
Some trusts own considerably more properties than the Dorset one. BBONT, the trust for Bucks, Berks and Oxon, looks after more than 100, as does the Scottish Wildlife Trust, although within a much larger constituency. Typically a trust will own a large number of low-key nature reserves looked after by a farming neighbour or by volunteers, and a few high-profile ones with public facilities, a resident warden, and usually something exciting to see. It helps, for example, that ospreys nest at the Scottish Wildlife Trust’s showcase reserve at the Loch of the Lowes, where they can be viewed from a hide. BBONT’s equivalent is its Warburg Reserve, named after a celebrated Oxford botanist, a 100-hectare slice of Chiltern downland and forest, famous for its wild orchids and comparable in quality, scale and complexity with English Nature’s Aston Rowant nature reserve not far away.
Some trusts own a flock of hardy sheep, which are taken from reserve to reserve as they are needed, rather like a touring party of conservation volunteers. (Conservationists are just as unsentimental about farm animals as farmers, often referring to them as ‘management tools’ or ‘mowing machines’.) Woodland management presents special difficulties, since the skills that maintained our ancient woods have fallen into disuse. Years ago I had need to visit a lot of woodland nature reserves, and the contrast between the work of a professional woodman and a band of weekend volunteers was sadly obvious, and the former made a better conservationist. Fortunately skills are being relearnt, and the renewed demand for coppice products, especially for barbecues, is producing a new generation of professional woodmen.
Exmoor ponies are widely used by the National Trust, county wildlife trusts and English Nature to keep rough grassland and heathland free of scrub. This also helps to conserve the breed, believed to be closely related to prehistoric wild horses. (Natural Image/Bob Gibbons)
My own trust, the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust (p. 75) specialises in grassland management. The Trust’s 310 hectares of grassland nature reserves are let for livestock grazing to up to 20 different farmers. However, in the recurrent farming crises of the 1990s, it has become more difficult to find suitable grazers. Fortunately for some reserves a new type of farmer has stepped into the breach, smallholders who specialise in rare and traditional breeds of farm animals. There is now an eager market for such animals among discerning diners, which is lucky because they are generally hardier and better adapted to rough grazing than modern breeds. They look better too – Belted Galloways and Aberdeen Angus cattle on Wiltshire reserves look as though they have been part of the landscape since the Iron Age. By cropping the grass, and munching unwanted invasive plants, the animals maintain the grass in the optimum condition for wildlife. For its downland reserve at Morgans Hill, the Trust had the luck to find a shepherd with a small herd of miniature Dexter cattle, tough enough to withstand the harsh winter winds of the Marlborough Downs, light enough to use wet ground without poaching it too badly. The coarse grass that has overrun the Green Lane Meadow reserve may soon be tackled by Exmoor ponies and Hebridean sheep, both breeds that have become very popular with nature reserve managers. Extravagantly horned Jacob sheep apparently did ‘a fantastic job’ of browsing off invading scrub on another Trust reserve. Other exotic animals currently grazing Britain’s nature reserves include primitive tarpan and Przewalski’s horses and water buffalo.
Nature reserve signs are often ‘dumbed down’ with minimal information and no map. This is one of the better ones, for Overhall Grove, Cambridgeshire.
National Nature Reserves in England (from English Nature, Annuàl Report 1999-2000).
With its growing experience of managing large grassland nature reserves, the Wiltshire Trust has recently branched out into habitat restoration. With the help of the Heritage Lottery it acquired a 235-hectare-wartime airfield and nearby farm at Blakehill, which, until recently, most wildlife bodies would not have looked twice at. Yet, although it has been neglected too long, and has grown tussocky and monotonous, this area on the stiff ‘Minety clays’ of North Wiltshire has never been ploughed and could be restored into rich pasture full of wild flowers. The Trust hopes to improve diversity by cutting hay and grazing it with cattle and ponies. This form of natural clay pasture is now considered to be an endangered habitat Europe-wide; with this one site, the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust will help the Government to reach nearly half of its ten-year target for restoring old meadows.
Nature reserves are often expensive to acquire and demanding to manage. Why, then, have the wildlife trusts devoted so much effort into building up networks of reserves, especially when so many others are doing the same? The traditional reason was to save the best of what is left of the wilder countryside. Another cogent reason is to provide a service for members, and perhaps also the local community: somewhere to go to on a sunny day. But nowadays, nature reserves serve other aspects of a wildlife trust’s agenda. Like the National Nature Reserves, they can demonstrate ways of managing wildlife that may also retain land value and generate a modest profit from rents, sales and grants – in other words show that they can be a financial, as well as a spiritual, asset, a useful thing in these days of farm diversification and low-input organic produce. They also promote wildlife conservation in a more general way, by inspiring wonder and compassion for wildlife in a more involving way than television. Nature reserves are the trusts’ shop-window displays. They show what trusts do, and what they stand for.
Hopes and dreams: island reserves
The recent history of the Hebridean islands known as the ‘Small Isles’ – Rum, Eigg and Canna, plus the even smaller isle of Muck – forms an interesting case study in nature conservation. All except Muck are owned by bodies that have conservation as a primary aim, and so are de facto nature reserves. Rum, the largest, is a National Nature Reserve, owned on behalf of the nation by Scottish Natural Heritage. Eigg belongs to the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust, a partnership of the resident islanders, Highland Council and the Scottish Wildlife Trust. Canna is owned by the National Trust for Scotland ‘for the benefit of the nation’. All three islands are noted for their natural beauty and wildlife, which includes seabirds and seals, eagles and otters. Perhaps their most distinctive species is the Manx shearwater, which nests in large numbers on Rum, with smaller colonies on Eigg and Canna. Each island has a crop of protective designations: SSSIs, National Scenic Areas, Special Protection Areas for birds, and so on. Some might see them as an island paradise, others (we hard-nosed ecologists) as overgrazed landscapes functioning at well below their biological potential: Fraser Darling’s ‘wet deserts’. The people that actually live there have to find ways of reconciling heritage with community income and quality of life. What do conservationists have to offer here?
Physically the Small Isles are surprisingly diverse. Rum is the wildest, a mainly mountainous landscape penetrated by glens, with almost no cultivated land. This is an accident of history as much as geography. Owned between 1888 and 1957 by the Bullough family, who made their money from Lancashire cottonmills, Rum was off limits to all but a privileged few, and gained a reputation as ‘the forbidden isle’. There were no crofters or vested interests to worry about, as everyone who lived there worked for the Bulloughs. In 1957, the Nature Conservancy purchased Rum – at £23,000, less than a pound an acre – as an ‘outdoor laboratory’. Acquired in a spirit of ‘optimism for the future of nature conservation’ (Boyd 1999), Rum offered opportunities for ecological investigations ‘requiring complete quiet and immunity from interference’. The long-term goal was to transform the island into what it might have been before sheep and deer had laid it waste, Fraser Darling’s dream of a wet Eden of mountains, woods and bubbling, trout-filled streams.
In reality, for all its hallowed status as ‘a jewel in the crown’ of National Nature Reserves, the experience of Rum has fallen well short of that vision. For the goals of the 1960s, the island had its uses. The sheep were all removed in 1957 after the Conservancy took over, and it now offered controlled conditions for Professor Tim Clutton-Brock FRS and his colleagues at Cambridge University to study red deer. But because it was important to preserve the deer herd, the pasture quality suffered, and natural regeneration has been limited. Instead, native trees, raised inside fenced nurseries, were methodically planted in Kinloch Glen, 15 hectares per year. In 1970, the first of two herds of Highland cattle was introduced to improve grassland diversity. In 1975 the first introduced sea eagles were raised and released on Rum.
But what must have seemed like a wonderful idea in 1957 had become something of an administrative nightmare 30 years later. Running Rum required a considerable financial outlay, and in terms of ‘wildlife gain’ what was happening there scarcely justified it. There was the heavy expense of maintaining a grand Edwardian folly, Kinloch Castle, which the Conservancy tried unsuccessfully to offload onto the National Trust for Scotland. While the Conservancy needed to own Rum in order to provide suitably stable and isolated conditions for long-term research, this inevitably entangled its successors in tasks that are closer to routine estate management than nature conservation: stalking, tree planting and animal husbandry. Doing all this on a remote offshore island poses severe practical and logistical problems. Today, some question whether a nature reserve, with all that that implies about exclusion and depopulation, is the right use of a significant Hebridean island like Rum (on the other hand, maybe we need places that are difficult to get to, and pretty rough when we get there).
Canna is a softer, more fertile island than Rum with a related but distinctive set of problems. Unlike Rum, Canna has enclosed farmland and several crofts. The island was given to the National Trust by its previous owner, John Lorne Campbell. Crofting has all but ceased, and Canna’s single farm runs at a loss despite its sizeable headage of sheep. The island’s diversity is declining. Most of the former patchwork of small hay and crop fields, cattle-grazed heaths and ‘lazy beds’ is now a uniform baize tablecloth of grass, much to the pleasure of the island’s many rabbits, which keep it cropped short. This has been a disaster for the corncrake, for which Canna in its crofting days was a stronghold. Trust volunteers and summer wardens are hoping to tempt it back by fencing plots of tall grass and marsh, and planting ‘gardens’ of nettles and cow parsley, but the only long-term solution to this and other problems is the revitalisation of traditional agriculture. The island’s character and the survival of its community go hand-in-hand, but the Trust finds itself struggling to prop up a failing island economy on a relatively modest budget. Unless it can solve the social problems, there is no likelihood of finding long-term solutions to the conservation issues, since the one tends to depend on the other (Johnston 2000).
The third of our island trio, Eigg, has the same sorts of things that you find on Rum, Canna and many other Hebridean islands – seals, shearwaters, puffins, various mountain flowers and Atlantic bryophytes, and, on a clear day, sensational views. Perhaps Eigg’s most individual features are its singing beach of white sand, its natural scrublands of hazel and willow, and the plinth-like Sgurr, ‘the highest pitchstone ridge in Britain’. Nature on Eigg is now primarily the responsibility of the Scottish Wildlife Trust. But what is a small trust with a modest income doing in a place like Eigg? Its presence is part circumstance, part opportunity. Having established a small nature reserve (the hazel scrub) there in 1979, the Trust had a representative living on the island who led the successful buyout in 1997, which resulted in the formation of a community trust to manage the island’s affairs. But Eigg also happened to be the right size, and with sufficiently varied natural features, for an experiment in integrating nature conservation into island life. The SWT’s hopes for Eigg are not dissimilar to those of the NTS on Canna or the SNH on Rum. It wants to introduce more native trees, and give the natural scrub there a chance to regenerate and spread. It wants to introduce ‘conservation-friendly’ farming, which in the Hebrides tends to mean ‘corncrake-friendly’ farming. It wants to control bracken by cutting the expanding fronds with a tractor-and-swipe, and it wants to establish a better grazing regime, probably with more cattle and fewer sheep, with temporary fences to allow orchids to flower. It cannot afford to pay for all these things, but hopes it is in a position to act as honest broker for the island community and pull the right levers.
The Sgurr, Eigg’s main landmark. (Derek Ratcliffe)
In terms of wildlife management – or at least aspirations of wildlife management – Rum, Eigg and Canna are on a converging course. Allowing for the islands’ physical differences, the conservation policies of the various bodies look remarkably similar. However, the main issue in each case is not nature conservation in isolation, but the sustainable development of land and support for the island communities. Even on Rum, the emphasis is changing from research and experiments towards a broader policy of sustainable land use with a proper regard for the island’s cultural inheritance. All conventional land uses in the Hebrides are hopelessly uneconomic on their own terms, and can be maintained only by subsidy. Sustainability, in other words, has to be paid for. Wildlife conservation is arguably as valid a land use as any other, especially now that tourism brings in more income than agriculture. But without farming, some of the wildlife may not be sustainable either. One cannot help wondering whether conservation bodies might have been tempted by the siren voices of the isles into entering projects that will strain their limited resources without necessarily much to show for it at the end. Perhaps a solution, as Laughton Johnston has suggested, lies in pooling their resources. For example, Rum’s Highland cattle could be moved to Canna, which, unlike Rum, could probably sustain a beef enterprise. The animals could then be used to service both isles from a secure farm base. Or is it all just a dream, given the harsh climate, unfavourable soils and inaccessibility of the western isles? The significance of the Small Isles experiment lies in how far the idea of a nature reserve has changed from concepts of simple exclusion towards social and economic integration. Nature reserves form part of the wider land ownership debate in Scotland, and places like Eigg, and, on a larger scale, the Cairngorms, have become ‘outdoor laboratories’ of a different kind. If these experiments in subsidy management succeed, they may influence the future of the Western Highlands and Islands. If they don’t, the experience may suggest to some that, while conservationists may preach the virtues of sustainable, wildlife-friendly land use, they are less adept at putting their fine words into practice.