Yesterday afternoon, in bright spring sunshine and a cutting northwesterly breeze, I walked along the turf embankments that, for the last two centuries, have bounded the estuary below our house . On one side, lawn-like flats that will soon be ablaze with sea pinks (thrift) ran down to the water’s edge where boats restlessly tugged at their moorings as though eager for the sailing season to begin. On the other side were the level, rather wet meadows, studded with ewes and their new lambs, which the embankments had reclaimed from the sea all those years ago. A network of deep drainage ditches, almost too extensive to comprehend and now neglected and choked with tall norfolk reed, stretched into the distance.
Coming towards me I saw a tall figure, bent under the weight of a half bag of feed, and recognised him as the owner of the sheep. He limped slightly in the way that farmers in their sixties do after more soakings and heavy work than hip joints can stand. When we met he swung the sack to the ground and leaned on his stick while his dog gambolled round us. Evidently he was prepared to stop and chat.
After the usual exchanges about the lateness of the spring, the cold wet weather that makes lambing a perilous business, a ewe that had drowned in one of the ditches, and remarks about the doings of various mutual acquaintances, he got on to his problems with what he called ‘those nature people’. I had asked him if he grazed his sheep on the estuary itself and he said he certainly did, it was quite good grazing after ‘those pink flowers’ were out. But now there was a problem. The whole area had become an SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest) and ‘a little girl’ had come and told him that he was to have no more than twenty-five ewes and their lambs on the estuary at any time.
“I told her,” he said. “When the pink flowers start, I open the gate, and the sheep go there if they want. There may be fifty go down there one day, and none the next. That’s the way I’ve always farmed this land and I’m too old to change now. She went away and I haven’t heard any more about it”. But he was obviously worried that he might. The grazing in the meadows is poor, and the sheep need what feed they can find.
To divert him from his troubles I asked if there were any otters about the estuary. These are rare in our area, but a year or two before I had seem a burrow in the embankment that I thought might be a holt. Yes, he said, there were otters in the drainage ditches, but what I had seen was actually an old badger set. He’d never seen the otters himself (he always has a dog ranging about him) but he had heard them in the reeds. Otters are quite noisy creatures when they are feeling amorous. His wife had seen them when she was out walking, and I could tell from his expression that he was happy that they were there and proud to have them on his land.
On the other side of the estuary stands one of the oldest churches in Wales, founded by monks who crossed the Irish sea in leather covered curraghs not long after the Romans left Britain. They would have brought livestock with them to sustain their precarious foothold on a hostile shore, with mountains full of unpredictable pagans before them and the turbulent sea at their backs. No doubt sheep grazed the estuary nearly a millennium and a half ago, and the close-cropped machair* that makes this place so beautiful is a testament to their having done so ever since. Ecologists should learn to work with the locals and even more importantly, listen to them, if they are going to contribute anything to the well being of the countryside. Dissertations on the value of biodiversity may earn a degree, but academic study is not a fool-proof preparation for the complexities of the natural world.
We agreed that the wildlife of the estuary had been there long before ‘the nature people’ had come to protect it, and that it would still be there long after it had gone. We chatted for a little longer, until the breeze began to seem even colder, and then I went on my way, and he trudged towards the cluster of ewes that had seen the bag on his back and were waiting expectantly.
I am sure that he will not share his knowledge of the otters with ‘the little girl’. She might try and stop him farming altogether.
* Low-lying grazing land formed near the coast by the deposition of sand and shell fragments by the wind.
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