Dear Mr Gove! Wake up to this mess!

Dear Mr Gove You have a mess on your hands and despite the fact that you inherited much of it, you have let Natural England dig you into an even deeper hole.  But in any case, it’s now your mess because you are sitting at the desk at which the buck stops. Why would you…

Ban the burn on bogs

While I was swanning around in Yorkshire on holiday there was an important conference event held in Edale talking about the future of blanket bogs in the South Pennines (although its findings seem equally to apply to the North Pennines and other areas I guess). Interesting reports reached me of unlikely events such as plates…

The Moorland Imbalance (5)

In their little booklet, the GWCT address five areas that they say are commonly-heard criticisms of driven grouse shooting. This week I’ll deal with each of them. GWCT say that a commonly-heard criticism is that ‘Heather burning on grouse moors increases flooding’ and attempt to sidestep this in the same way that they attempted to…

Guest blog – On Nature Writing and Reading by Nicola Chester

Nicola lives with her family in the North Wessex Downs, in the far west of West Berkshire. She has written for the RSPB and her local newspaper for over a decade, has written a book on Otters and features in each of the Wildlife Trusts’ Seasons Anthologies, edited by Melissa Harrison. As well as writing…