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Book Review
| The Moorlands of England and Wales: An Environmental History 8000 BC to AD 2000. By Ian G. Simmons. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd.; distributed in the United States by Columbia University Press (New York), 2004. ix + 414 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, select bibliography, glossary, index. Cloth $75.00, paper $27.00.
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| Moorlands are a habitat largely restricted to the British Isles. They are uplands but not true mountains, botanically analogous to the lowland heaths of Germany, Denmark, Holland, and southern England (which are under still greater pressure), but high, wet, and cold. They are a landscape of broad open spaces, dominated by heather (Calluna) or coarse grasses (Molinia and nardus), sometimes now by dark plantations of Sitka spruce. Since the Romantics at least they have been contested territory—should they be for use, or delight; for production, or pleasure; are they a waste, demanding reclamation and investment, or, as the historian G. M. Trevelyan put it in 1938, "regions where young and old can enjoy the sight of unspoiled nature." |
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Though there have been useful works on the ecology of the British uplands, this is the first environmental history of its kind. It is a wide-ranging survey that will be a useful text for college students of geography and environmental studies, and provide a reflective introduction for anyone at all concerned with the precarious future of this habitat today. The author deals only with England and Wales, explaining that Scotland would need its own book and excluding also the "truly mountainous areas" like the Lake District in England and Snowdonia in Wales. He tackles the subject in eight chapters: one on the underlying geology; three on the history of human impact which take him from the Mesolithic to the modern; one geared to the present condition of the moors in relation to conservation imperatives, followed by a case study of three contrasting areas of the Northern Pennines, Dartmoor, and South Wales, one on how moors have been represented by artists and painters, and finally a summary with a glance to the future. He packs in a great deal of information and touches on many subjects. If it sometimes proves hard in the space available to develop an argument at appropriate length, the bones of contention are at least laid out so that the reader can begin to gnaw at them. |
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One message comes over loud and clear. Moorland, though wild, is emphatically not wilderness, and from the earliest times to the present day has been so much the scene of human modification that it is really an artifact. Mesolithic hunter-gatherers opened it up for wild grazing animals and easy stalking, even keeping back encroaching woodland to maintain an open hill: Combined with climate change, this assisted the spread of blanket bog. Iron Age and Medieval farmers kept it open or cleared more of the wood, and their fields encroached on the moorland edge when demographic and commercial pressure demanded it and climate allowed, retreating again when climate, markets, and populations changed. None of this happened in a simple or monocausal way, but it was rather a complex dance up and down the hill that has left a wealth of archaeological traces. With industrialization, moorlands in England and Wales frequently became the site of intensive mineral extraction. This would have been much less true of Scotland. The tension between production and pleasure led in the twentieth century on the one hand to overgrazing by sheep, on the other to a welter of conflicting demands by grouse-moor owners, ramblers, the military seeking training areas, foresters seeking cheap land, and now windmill firms seeking sites for the generation of green energy. Yet they are wild, inspiring, lonely, soul-reviving places: not Trevelyan's "unspoilt nature," but something steeped in human history as well. |
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All this is clearly and forcefully put. The index is poor, and Table 5.4 is wrong about the numbers of red grouse and the numbers and trend of black grouse. Such details are minor blemishes. |
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T. C. Smout is the author of Nature Contested: an Environmental History of Scotland and Northern England since 1600 (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), and he is working at present on Scottish woodland history. He works at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. |
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