2025 marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the first national park. There has been some quiet celebration in some sections of the media. Much less has been said about the condition of some of our national parks.
The term “national park” suggests a green place in which nature flourishes. Guy Shrubsole’s latest book, The Lie of the Land, shows that, in many places, this is far from the truth. He cites a report by the RSPB showing that Sites of Special Scientific Interest inside the UK’s national parks were on average in a worse condition than those outside.
Most of the land inside the national parks is not publicly owned – it belongs to farmers, forestry companies and wealthy landowners. Many of these people claim that they are the true stewards of the countryside. This claim is quite simply unsustainable. Large swathes of the English uplands are owned by a very small number of wealthy people who use it for shooting grouse or pheasant. Among the owners of the North York moors are the Earl of Mexborough and the Duchy of Lancaster.
Peat moorland is a natural carbon sink. But in many areas, the peat is being eroded, so it becomes a carbon source – emitting CO2 into the atmosphere instead of locking it up.
So, who benefits from grouse shooting? Mostly it’s the wealthy owners of the moors and the people who can afford a couple of thousand pounds for a day’s “sport”. Some employment is created, mainly for gamekeepers and local hoteliers but the latter might do just as well from looking after hill walkers if there was no shooting.
The environmental damage caused by shooting is considerable: birds of prey are regularly (and illegally) killed by gamekeepers, many areas have been drained causing the peat to dry out and die, thus contributing to flooding in nearby towns.
Worst of all is the practice of heather burning: this is done to stimulate younger heather shoots, which the birds prefer to eat. Shrubsole describes the aftermath: “…a charred landscape, the blackened remnants of heather, dead mosses left bleached and bone dry, the tiny skeletons of frogs and mice that got caught in the inferno.”
The last government proposed a statutory prohibition on heather burning. But, after lobbying by the shooting industry, they introduced a voluntary ban. It didn’t last long. Groups such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds recorded footage of continued burning. So the government finally introduced the legal prohibition. It has been repeatedly disobeyed. One company applied for a licence to burn, the application was rejected but the company’s gamekeepers burned the heather anyway. The company was convicted. It was fined just £2645. This is not a deterrent.
The astonishing aspect of the grouse industry is that it continues to receive a public subsidy: Natural England supplied data to the RSPB indicating that £105 million of public money had been given to owners of grouse moors. As Shrubsole observes – it would be cheaper for the government simply to buy the grouse moors than to continue paying the owners to carry out improvements.
One simple solution is not mentioned in this book: why not impose a drastic reduction in the number of shotgun certificates? It may be the case that arable farmers need shotguns as a way of reducing crop damage by pigeons. But it can’t be said that anyone really needs to slaughter grouse or pheasant.
British uplands could be rewilded with huge environmental benefits – patchworks of peat, grass and forest. They can be genuinely diverse spaces. But, in so many cases, the owners of the moors manage them badly in order to extract maximum profits.
