I have just returned from a few days in my hometown Guisborough on the edge of the North York Moors national park. In many ways it is a beautiful area, the open heather moorland stretches for miles and recent legislation allows us to wander away from the paths and feel a great sense of freedom.
This landscape has been the subject of many of my paintings and numerous locations are still 'magical' to me, places haunted by memories of childhood. I used to think this was a wild and natural place teeming with wildlife, but then I was embedded in the culture. My father has always been a regular shooting man and the language of the gamekeeper informed opinion in our house. We often ate what he shot; rabbit, woodpigeon and occasionally pheasant or duck.
I always appreciated that the moors were used for the rearing of red grouse, there are shooting butts everywhere (places where wealthy men hide with guns awaiting the grouse which are driven towards them by local peasants known as 'beaters') and the heather is burnt regularly to keep conditions suitable for grouse to thrive.
Now at entrances to the moors there are intrusive new 'information' boards where it is claimed that these conditions are also good for a hand full of other species such as the curlew (rarely spotted, wonderful cry) and the merlin (never spotted). What is not mentioned is the active persecution of other species which might predate upon the grouse. You will never see a buzzard here, a legally protected bird now so common elsewhere, I have even seen them over Nottingham. This month three gamekeepers from the area were convicted for laying poison traps to kill birds of prey, they were fined a few hundred pounds, moor owners will earn £150 for every pair of grouse shot.
Unexamined too are the effects of lead shot sprinkled in abundance over this 'protected' flora and fauna and the huge heather fires lit between december and april. Not only do these choke the valleys and villages with thick smoke they must have a huge carbon footprint and are continually destroying other plants and food-chains. I await the reply from the North York Moors park authority on this matter, but it looks a glaring anomaly to me. In all other areas we now recognize the urgency in limiting carbon emissions, why not here?
Why not let some of this vast grouse-farm return to the wild or even plant trees to offset the emissions. Let there be forests on the moor like at Birchover in Derbyshire. Let it become a wild place again to benefit the lives of the town-hunched folk rather than the tiny minority of super-rich from elsewhere. Let there actually be the biodiversity proclaimed on these notice boards rather than the destruction caused by this cruel and elitist victorian hobby.
This is what I see now when I visit. Yes the heather is lovely in august, but mostly its brown, gray or blackened. This is a spoiled landscape. No longer the wilderness of childhood.
