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John Lewis-Stempel: The moors, a landscape of ‘seamless sameness’

John Lewis-Stempel John Lewis-Stempel

Once considered a vast, stretching terror-land synonymous with bog, the national perception of the ecologically invaluable moors has dramatically changed

Odd places, moors. These wet, wide-open uplands used to be the dumping ground for our national phantasmagoria and psychic fears. Other northern European nations projected their topography of terror onto the woods, but for us it was the (almost) tree-free moor. Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon epic composed between the 8th and 10th centuries, was an early cultural iteration of the national psyche: the carousers in King Hrothgar’s mead hall are attacked and devoured by a monster, angered by their merrymaking: ‘Grendel this monster grim was called,/march-riever mighty.’

At the time of the poem’s writing, all of our major moors were already two millennia old, their trees having been cut to the ground by prehistoric farmers. Perhaps with the partial exception of Dartmoor, largely treeless in antiquity, our wild-looking moors are actually agricultural constructs, maintained by tree-nibbling livestock, primarily sheep.

Although the Anglo-Saxons were born farmers, the moors were unappealing, uninhabited, having been depopulated by the thousand since the Iron Age. Where there were still folk on the moor, they tended to be Celts and Britons, races resolutely resistant to the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Grendels one and all.

Like a snowball down a Yorkshire moorland slope, the national dislike of the moor expressed itself through, inter alia, Macbeth (the witches) and the Gothic novels of the Brontë sisters, until Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) where the moor is utter terror-land, with Sir Henry crying, ‘As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor.’

‘Moorland occurs on the uplands where the old, hard rocks rise and the wet Atlantic airstream creates a constantly water-logged habitat that encourages the formation of peat and bog, beck and mere’

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Moorland: I know the frisson of fear that comes from the momentary loss of bearing in a landscape of seamless sameness that stretches to the far horizon. Moorland: I know the anxiety of the wintry light going and a dozen peaty, drowning pools — any of which could harbour a Grendel — between you and the path you strayed from after sighting a rare bird, because on the empty moor who would hear you calling for help above the scream of the birds?

I rather like moors, but one can understand the apprehension of the people of the Past Time. Of course, the national perception of the moor has inverted. The 1930s saw a mass movement of factory and office workers towards the open countryside, for leisurely hours of fresh air and Nature. The moors became a place to escape to, not from, with access increasingly expanded after the mass trespass by ramblers of Kinder Scout in the Peak District in 1932.

What enabled the great adoption of the moor as human holiday habitat was, quite simply, transport. Bus, car, bike — the 1930s were the golden age of cycling clubs — brought the moors, previously dark foreboding hills in the distance, within convenient reach. The freedom to come, but to go home, safe and sound. Today, we go up to the moor in cars. We want the wilderness, but we also want some familiar touchstone — a trackway, a domestic sheep, a phone signal. A car to go home in.

Fortuitously for those of us who find moors moreish, moorland begets moorland: the relentless advance of the peat blanket — which is composed of rotted vegetation — makes these altitudinous wet places inimical to most trees. Today, the UK boasts a higher proportion of moorland than any other country: 15% of the world’s total. Moorland occurs on the uplands where the old, hard rocks rise and the wet Atlantic airstream creates a constantly water-logged habitat that encourages the formation of peat and bog, beck and mere. In a vicious — or, perhaps, virtuous — eco-circle, high rainfall then leaches nutrients from soil already impoverished. Moorland soil is poor soil, covered by a layer of crumbly black peat, which deepens or spreads as vegetation decomposes. Go up to the 7,000 sweeping acres of Spaunton Moor on the North York Moors, pick up a handful of peat, roll it through your fingers: it’s seaside sandy.

At once wild and wonderful: Combestone Tor overlooking the panorama of Dartmoor. Credit: Will Tudor via Getty

It takes a special breed of flora to live in this terrain. Most characteristic of all such plants is heather, a close-knit evergreen undershrub with tough woody stems and roots housing fungal threads that help them gain nutrients (a walker knows when he or she has reached moorland: one feels like flopping back on the heather’s springiness to stare at the big sky). The North York Moors carry England’s largest expanse of heather moorland. Heather’s tiny spikes are rich in nectar and, from July to September, they transform from burnt-cork hues into a glorious blaze of purple, a botanical wonder of the Western world.

As Frank Elgee, geologist, naturalist and the North York Moors’s great advocate, put it in The Moorlands of North-Eastern Yorkshire (1912): ‘If, unacquainted with moors, we were told by travellers of extensive regions overgrown with dwarf, shrubby plants, possessing myriads of purple flowers, giving a definite colour to many square miles of the earth’s surface, we should express our surprise at their discovery.’ Heather’s leaves are food for the caterpillars of the emperor moth and its tiny shoots are food-stuff for the red grouse, the bird that is the avian symbol of northern moorland.

Wide. Open. Space. The poet Ted Hughes was surely correct to liken the Yorkshire moors to natural auditoria. This is especially true in the oxygen-delirium of a breezy spring morning, where Spaunton Moor, among others, puts on a magnificent birdy performance of tumbling pied lapwings, plunging golden plover, curlew chorusing in their tremulous, trembling voices, cur-lee, cur-lee — stress on the second syllable — and the sun-coppered red grouse chanting their deep, rich ka-ka-kak-krrrr. Then, cuckoos calling from four far-flung corners of the moor; Cuculus canorus, due to its decline in the industrialised agriculture of the lowland, is increasingly a bird of the moor and the high places.

Such an earthly English delight of cuckoos, waders and game birds does not occur by accident. Spaunton is a sympathetically ‘keepered’ moor, where predators such as the fox and weasel are controlled so that birds — including grouse for shooting — can flourish. Curlew productivity is fourfold higher on grouse moors (1.05 fledglings per pair) than non-grouse moors (0.27 fledglings per pair). This matters. The UK supports a quarter of Eurasian curlew, Numenius arquata, so declines here affect the total population. Our moorlands are among our most contested national spaces, with the anti-shooting lobby ever more vocal. I do not do ‘driven grouse shooting’ myself, but shouldn’t any proper conversation about upland conservation recognise that, as with Spaunton Moor, what is good for the grouse can be good for avia galore, as well as gandering ramblers?

John Lewis-Stempel has twice been crowed winner of the Wainwright prize for nature writing, and was the 2016 BSME Columnist of the Year. His new book, ‘England: A Natural History’, explores 12 distinctive habitats of England

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