Feral

by George Monbiot

  After tea and scones, he took me out onto his land. His sheep, which were beginning to swell, were still in the low pastures surrounding the house. Dafydd explained that he puts the ewes with the rams later than most farms do, so that they could lamb in the fields, rather than indoors. ‘In the fields, the sheep don’t give birth after dusk. If you do it in the shed, it’s round the clock. But it’s essential to get up early, as they start lambing at dawn. The crows line up on the fence, waiting for their moment. They’ll pluck the eyes out of the lambs even before they’re fully born. You have to be there to keep them off.’

  As we walked up the track which cut across his land, I started to become aware that I was in the presence of an excellent mind. Over the next few hours, he would speak about the best way to rebuild a cheap hydroelectric turbine, the long-distance signalling system used by the Romans, the problems associated with acid waste lagoons in China, new caving routes through the disused slate mines, the difference between a clacker wheel and an overshoot wheel and a dozen other subjects, in every case with an unusual combination of lightness and authority. He had also prepared himself well for my visit: he had read and considered the key texts on the subject I had come to discuss. He was–and this is a word I seldom use–a brilliant young man. He could have done anything. But he had chosen the sparsest and hardest of livings. It also became clear to me that he had something else few people possessed: he knew who he was. I envied him that.

  Dafydd had a degree in Welsh, from Cardiff University. He spent half his time farming and divided the rest between translation work (mostly in the winter) and outdoor education (mostly in the summer). He was deeply embedded in the life of his valley, helping to run, for example, the community woodland that had replaced a local conifer plantation. ‘Here,’ he told me, ‘you’ve got the history of the nation written out in the landscape.’

  The low sunshine exposed every scratch and tump of the sheep-shaved ground. Half-buried in turf were the remains of a drystone wall–first built, Dafydd said, in 1680–that once separated the two great estates whose boundary his farm had straddled. It ran across the many miles of moor and mountain from Pumlumon to Cwmystwyth. Half of one of the estates had been lost–as tradition demanded–in a card game, which was why the farm whose tenancy his great-grandfather had later taken had been split between two owners. Among the knolls and tummocks he pointed to were Bronze Age burial mounds, medieval longhouse platforms and mystery enclosures, which might have been fishponds, but appeared to be in the wrong place. The low nobbly hill facing us, he told me, belonged to a farm which was mentioned in the Mabinogion, Welsh legends some 1,500 years old.

  Beside the path was a pile of stones, sketching the barest outline of four walls, now sinking back into the close-cropped grass. ‘That house was last inhabited in 1916, by the old cook who worked at my mum’s school.’

  I followed him up the side of the hill to a patch of brighter grass and soft-centred rush. This, he said, was the remains of an old hushings. It was either Roman or medieval: the archaeologists had not been able to decide. I confessed that I did not know what the word meant.

  He explained that it was part of the valley’s old lead-mining system. The miners built a dam above the deposits they wanted to expose, and channelled water through a leat into the pond it held. When the reservoir was full, they would breach the dam and the water would rush down the hillside, sweeping away the overburden. This was, in other words, the method I had seen deployed in the goldmines of Roraima, but without the use of diesel pumps.

  Both the grass and the land it covered became rougher as we climbed. Dafydd explained that, to obtain green subsidies,*2 he had to keep his sheep off the mountain in the winter. He led me up into his summer grazings on Mynedd yr Ychen, Oxen Mountain. Short tufts of heather, still in the black mourning clothes of winter, survived amid the grass. Last year’s dried flowers rattled on the stems. As we reached the crest of the hill, the great yellow plateau opened up. It rose towards that least distinct of mountains, Pumlumon Fawr, which, upwelling gently from the massif, always looks smaller than it is. Its grey and yellow flanks were patched with artless blocks of spruce. But for the wind, the land was silent. As usual in the Cambrians, no birds called and nothing rustled in the grass.

  The heather on this pasture, Dafydd told me, might explain the name of the mountain, as cattle need a large amount of copper in their diet, and heather is a rich source. That it was called Oxen–not Cattle–Mountain suggested that the name pre-dated the era of horse traction: oxen were used for heavy work from the Bronze Age until a few centuries ago. The boundary wall between the mountain and the winter pastures closer to the house, he later told me, had been built to allow the sheep to regulate their own grazing. It was banked up on the downhill side, to allow the sheep to move onto the mountain when their grazing in the lower fields declined, but not on the upper side, to ensure that they could not return until the farmer wished it.

  Clinging to the hillside below us were the crumbled walls of a small stone building. ‘That was the old goose house. Grandma used to walk up here every night to shut them in. The geese grazed on the grass and heather tips. The farming was more mixed in the past. Until 2000 we had a small herd of Herefords, which had come down from my great-grandfather’s cows.’

  Dafydd pointed out where the old farmsteads of his neighbours had stood, in some cases just three or four decades before. ‘At night there were lights twinkling all along the valley. Now they’ve gone.’

  He explained that this valley was once a busy thoroughfare. It was used by people walking to the church, to school and to the pub, which had now closed. It was used by the pilgrims who arrived at the docks in Aberystwyth (which were demolished long ago) to walk to the Cistercian abbey at Strata Florida. It was used by the drovers herding animals along the old trails to Rhayader and then to London.

  ‘Our history is carried by word of mouth, but it’s anchored to the land. The old boys used to play a game: one of them would leave his cap on a rock, somewhere in the mountains. Then he’d go into the pub and tell the name of the rock to a friend. That was all the information they needed. The friend had to run out and retrieve it. All the rocks had names. My uncle could remember all of them. They were never written down.’

  Listening to him, I realized that both of us were harking back to something that is no longer here. His thoughts were filled by the days in which the hills bustled with human life. Mine were filled by the days in which they bustled with wildlife.

  We came down the western side of the mountain, through low tussocks of gorse and heather, into the greener fields behind his house. As we approached the farmyard gate, we met Delyth, driving up the hill towards us on a quad bike with a trailer of hay, her white hair flying in the wind. She looked like Boudicca on her chariot. ‘I hope you’ll stop for lunch. It’s ready now,’ she said.

  ‘I’m trying to limit the physical work she does,’ Dafydd told me. ‘But farming’s in her blood and you can’t stop her. She’s only rolled the bike four times.’

  When she had fed the sheep, Delyth ushered us into her parlour again and served us cawl made from one of her own small flock of turkeys, sweetened with swede and carrot, and brown bread, still warm from the oven. She and Dafydd began to tell me about the history of their farm and the community.

  They explained that the estates started to form in the 1640s. The people here were not cleared, but had to pay to remain on the land they were already farming and had long seen as theirs. The first landlords were members of a Welsh aristocracy–Prices, Vaughans, Johneses–families which had supported Owain Glyndwr’s uprising. They helped to keep the culture and language alive. At Hafod Uchtryd, the great estate which had owned the eastern half of the farm, the Johneses kept a Welsh printing press in the cellar.

  In 1833, the Duke of Newcastle took over the estate. Delyth explained that attending the Anglican church rather than the Methodist chapel was a condition of tenancy: if you disobeyed the rule, you lost the farm.
‘Dafydd’s great-grandfather was worshipping and reciting in a language he didn’t understand. But his great-grandmother insisted on going to chapel: she wouldn’t speak to her Lord in English. It terrified her husband: we could have lost everything.

  ‘Our knowledge was not valued,’ Delyth went on. ‘The story was that people who stayed on the farms were the dimmest of all–so their knowledge must be dim as well. No one thought of writing it down. My father hardly wrote. He had to remember all the sheep figures, the prices and everything. There’s not the same need to use our brains now.’

  Dafydd was teaching himself the old Welsh counting system. Based on multiples of 10, 15 and 20, it was designed by shepherds for counting animals. ‘You can juggle the numbers between the fingers of your two hands, totting the blocks on one, the individuals on the other. It allows you to count very quickly. In the new numbers, you can’t count fast enough to match the speed that sheep run at. So you have to slow them down through the gate. From the 1970s onwards, Welsh learners were taught the decimal system. I can see the sense in that, but we’ve also lost something.’

  He could, Delyth told me, judge the weight of a sheep to within a kilo; they had stopped using the scales as he always got it right, and it was quicker to weigh them by eye. She could do something he could not: she could spot their diseases at a distance, diagnosing them from the way the sheep stand or lie. She also knows just when they are going to lamb.

  Dafydd gently moved the conversation onto the subject that divided us.

  ‘My concern with rewilding is that it takes the people out. I see it as a post-Romantic ideology which imagines what the land would be like if only people weren’t here. Look at what the Wildland Network*3 says at the bottom of its website: it wants the landscape “to be freed of human interference and managed with minimal intervention”. That yells “cleansing” to me.’

  There was, he explained, a deep local hostility to planting trees, as a result of the vandalism inflicted by the Forestry Commission during the middle decades of the twentieth century. As I had seen elsewhere in Wales, the commission launched a kind of Cultural Revolution in Wales, in which its green guards requisitioned ancient halls and farmsteads and dynamited them. In some cases they erased derelict villages,9 and replaced them with party-approved plantations of identical Sitka spruce trees. It was a crime for which there has been little acknowledgement and no reckoning.

  ‘The people of Myherin [the valley of the little stream to the east of his farm] were forced to leave: their land and homes were purchased under pressure. The commission planted 17,000 hectares of spruce where they had lived. Of the ten houses it bought, just three are still visible: two are in ruins, one is a bothy. The rest have just disappeared beneath the trees. The roots smashed up what remained. They destroyed all traces of the community.

  ‘I’m not against something new, not by any means, but it should be a progression from what you’ve got, not wiping the slate clean. With blanket rewilding you lose your unwritten history, your sense of self and your sense of place. It’s like book-burning. Books aren’t written about people like us. If you eradicate the evidence of our presence on the land, if you undermine the core economies that support the Welsh-speaking population in the language’s heartland, you write us out of the story. We’ve got nothing else.

  ‘Conservation should be about how we can live in nature. When it deviates from that, you forget that you’re still looking at it from a human perspective. I think rewilding is an oxymoron. As William Cronon points out, if you argue for wilderness for its own sake, you’re still imposing a human point of view.10

  ‘People say they want to reintroduce predators. Why? The wolves don’t miss being here. We’d be introducing them for the sake of alleviating human guilt about what we have done to the environment. Which is to meet a human need, not a wild need. It’s all based on our own value judgements. I see rewilding as post-Romantic gardening. It’s like those big rococo mansions with their toy milkmaid parlours.

  ‘I’d much prefer to see trees here than wind turbines. But neither would keep the school open, support the local shop or reopen the pub. The average age of farmers in the UK is now sixty-two. It rises every year. The danger is that we have old people who speak the “old” language and a place barren of everyone else. That’s a chilling thought.’

  ‘It’s also the visual impact,’ his mother added. ‘Without trees you can see all the lights from the other farmsteads across the valley. You don’t feel so lonely. The forestry shuts us off from each other. It would bring despair with it if you’re not careful.’

  I found these arguments compelling, and I left the farm feeling troubled and confused. Two sets of values, both of which I held strongly, were fighting each other. I was painfully aware of the damage sheep have done to the upland ecology of Britain, and to the upland ecology of many other parts of the world. The bird surveys and other evidence suggest that the impacts are intensifying. The industry that causes this damage depends upon public subsidies, here and in many other countries. So we are paying both to sustain its assault on nature and to prevent the land and its ecosystems from recovering.

  Yet the idea that Dafydd and Delyth and people like them should be pushed aside to make way for wildlife was also intolerable. I did not want to see their history erased or their culture blotted out, to witness a hushing: a sweeping away of the accumulated strata of their lives, a silencing of their voices.

  I did have responses to some of the specific points Dafydd raised. The land and its economy have changed drastically over the past half-century. Much of the public money which would once have supported people like Dafydd and Delyth is now taken by ranchers, people who don’t live on the land they farm and visit only when they have to. You can see abundant evidence of this long-distance farming on the roads of mid-Wales: Land Rovers driving this way and that, towing quad bikes in their trailers. The people who have bought this land are likely to have less interest in its history and culture. They are piggybacking on the moral capital of the Dafydds and Delyths, whose survival, for many taxpayers, is the only remaining justification for the extravagance of subsidies.

  As absentee ranching spreads and mechanization advances, employment on the farms declines, as it is doing worldwide. Farming in Wales now produces less than a quarter of the income generated by wildlife, despite the fact that it occupies a much greater area than the land set aside for nature. I have yet to see any plan for hill farming which predicts that sheep raising will provide a growing or even stable share of national employment. The remaining farmers, like Dafydd, survive by making much of their income from activities other than farming. Rewilding, on the other hand, has great potential to attract walkers and nature-lovers. Though the Cambrian Mountains are close to the conurbations of the West Midlands, they are scarcely visited today.

  In the early years, rewilding requires plenty of labour: planting trees, reintroducing lost plants and animals, removing fences and controlling exotic invasive species, such as rhododendron and Sitka spruce, and stray sheep. As the ecosystem recovered, the rewilding workforce would decline, but the potential for generating money from tourism would rise. Banishing the sheep and banishing the people are not the same thing. It is possible to envisage a thriving community of former farmers acting as wardens and guides, providing bed and breakfast, farm shops, clay-pigeon shooting, bicycle hire, horse riding, fishing lakes, falconry, archery and all the other services that now help rural communities to survive.

  Researchers in North America have studied places in which extractive industries have given way to wildlife, with mixed conclusions. One paper, for example, states that ‘employment and personal income levels in “wilderness” counties grew faster than in “resource-extraction” counties’.11 Another maintains that in regions where timber cutting had stopped in order to protect the forests, economic wellbeing ‘improved in some, deteriorated in some, and showed little change in other communities’.12 The results are likely to be different in other nati
ons, and the potential impacts, both positive and negative, should be carefully assessed. But it is possible that rewilding could do more than sheep farming to keep the school open, support the local shop or reopen the pub, which the current economy has manifestly failed to sustain.

  As for book-burning, I see it whenever I walk in the hills close to where I live. I see oak woods, which in some cases had been preserved by farmers or mining communities for centuries, being destroyed by the sheep that now graze beneath the trees. I see hedgerows being grubbed up, drystone walls replaced with wire fences, ancient trees which once marked the boundaries between farms ripped out and burnt. Yes, rewilding could present a threat to the cultural history of the land. But I also see farmers from the communities which claim to treasure this history obliterating it, with scarcely a voice of protest raised against them.

  If rewilding took place it would happen in order to meet human needs, not the needs of the ecosystem. That, for me, is the point of it. Wolves would be introduced not for the sake of wolves but for the sake of people. If rewilding happens it will be because we value a biologically rich environment more than we value an impoverished system which continues, with the help of public money, to support sheep.

  After I showed Dafydd the first draft of this chapter, he responded to my suggestion that the people of this nation should decide whether wolves are introduced as follows:

  Firstly, which people and which Nation? The loudest? The most well educated? The greatest percentage of the overall population? There is another value judgement here, do we value the enhancement and enrichment of outsiders’ lives over the needs of the existing community, placing the recreational and emotional needs of for example West Mid-landers over those of the local population? Isn’t this the same argument that was used to further the cause of reservoir building (e.g. Liverpool’s need for water in the case of Tryweryn) land clearance (our nation’s need for defence training at Eppynt and Penyberth) and the Forestry Commission’s afforestation (our growing nation’s need for timber)?!