This is an abstract from an article published in British Wildlife Magazine in 2008, written by Alistair Crowle. Images and captions are taken from the Moor House Memories document complied by John Adamson in 2009.
In the introduction to his classic Mountains and Moorlands, W H Pearsall (1950) reminds us that away from the ordered landscapes of the lowlands, “is another Britain, to many of us the better half, a land of mountains and moorlands and of sun and cloud…..It lies now, as always beyond the margins of our industrial and urban civilisations, fading into the western mists and washed by northern seas.” Nowhere in England is this epitomized more than at Moor House.
Situated in the heart of the North Pennines, Moor House has assumed an almost mythical status within the world of natural sciences and in particular, nature conservation. Like the castle of Arthurian legend, many have heard of Moor House but few know the road to her gates. Yet the road remains open, as it always has been, to those prepared to seek it and many have indeed made the journey. To date, the number of dissertations, theses, scientific papers, books and sections of books that have been written based entirely or in part upon work at Moor House runs to more than 700. The tale of this site is one of tragedy and triumph, but also it is the story of the birth of statutory nature conservation in Britain and its continuance within England. This is an account of how an unassuming corner of England has, metre for metre, become the most studied upland area in Britain and quite possibly the world.
The background to statutory nature conservation and the purpose of National Nature Reserves
It is remarkable to think that as early as 1940 people were planning and promoting the role of nature conservation in post-war Britain (Sheail 1995). It is easy to forget that this was the darkest period of the war when Britain largely stood alone whilst the Empire gathered its resources and the outcome was far from certain. The perseverance of a determined few led eventually to the publication of Command Paper 7122 Conservation of Nature in England and Wales in July 1947 that set out the requirements for a biological service and from this came the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949 and the creation of the Nature Conservancy – the first science based government conservation organisation in the world (Sheail 1998).
These early visionaries recognised that to manage land successfully would require knowledge that did not at that time exist. One of the ways that they thought that this could be addressed can be seen in the role of National Nature Reserves (NNRs) as set out in Command Paper 7122. Today, we would recognise the requirements of NNRs to provide for important flora and fauna, visitors and education but most do not realise that there was another specific role of reserves included within the Command Paper and this was for research and experimentation. The intention was to fill the knowledge gaps in regard to managing land for nature conservation and to integrate the work of the scientist and the practitioner, an approach that we take for granted today but 60 years ago was quite radical.
The establishment of Moor House NNR
The break-up of the Appleby Castle Estate resulted in the appearance of Moor House and Grouse Moor for sale by auction. Piggott (1988) records that the purchase of Moor House was made at the personal recommendation of W H Pearsall, who by this time had been studying the origins and nature of vegetation on blanket peat for many years. Pearsall, was one of the finest (some would say the finest) plant ecologists that Britain has ever produced and at the time of the break-up of the Appleby Castle Estate was Chairman of the Science Committee of the Nature Conservancy. He would remain an important guiding influence in regard to research on the Reserve up until his death in 1964.
The Nature Conservancy sought the purchase of Moor House as a typical upland site on which to base fundamental research into upland processes – both ecological and geological. A price of £5,300 was agreed for 10,000 acres including some mineral rights. In today’s money, this is equivalent to around £120,000 (J Harlow pers.comm.) and must go down as one of the great bargains in conservation history. The Nature Conservancy completed the purchase in January 1952 and on 19th May of the same year, Moor House National Nature Reserve, one of the first in Britain, was declared.
A Field Station was established, based in the old shooting lodge, and was administered from the Merlewood Research Station in Grange-over-Sands. The early work was overseen by the Conservancy’s Senior Botanist Verona Conway (in 1955 appointed as Director of Merlewood - the first woman to become director of a Government Research Station) whose work on blanket bog must place her with Pearsall and Gordon Manley as one of the early giants of the English uplands.
In its hey-day in the mid 1960’s, the Field Station was manned by an officer in charge, a resident warden Tom Hodgson and his family, a resident scientist (a botanist), an entomologist, a field assistant, estate worker and in the summer months, a housekeeper. Tom Hodgson was the both the first warden and member of staff employed at Moor House and his outstanding contribution to the establishment of the Reserve has probably been undervalued. At one time, up to four Freshwater Biological Association staff along with 1-3 summer sandwich students were based at the Station working on the rivers of the Reserve and Cow Green reservoir. The International Biological Programme also contributed two permanent staff.In total, there was overnight accommodation for 13 people.
It sounds an idyllic life but the reality was that many instruments required reading constantly over a 24 hour period and the winters were long and cold (the building was the highest inhabited house in England), emphasised by the fact that in the early days, contracts were let to clear snow from the track to the Field Station although from 1964-1979 this was done by reserve staff. In 1953, the first pony (Betty) was purchased to transport materials around the reserve. Communication was also limited, as it was not until 1960 that a telephone was established, linked by wireless to a small hut near the top of Great Dun Fell where a landline connected the Station to the outside world.
A fact not appreciated by many is that much of the site is Common Land. This meant the Nature Conservancy and its successors had very little control over the numbers of animals being grazed. As has been well documented (e.g. Sansom 1999), the period following designation coincided with subsidy (headage) payments that rewarded the farmer for keeping large numbers of sheep, and parts of the Reserve, like other upland areas, suffered the effects of overgrazing. Following the Foot and Mouth outbreak in 2001, funds were made available to purchase grazing rights and it was only then that a sustainable grazing regime was put in place.
Moor House was notified as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in 1951, and over the years revisions were made to the boundary through the inclusion of neighbouring SSSIs; in 1963, Cross Fell and in 1990, Upper Teesdale and Appleby Fells. It should be noted that the NNR is currently smaller than the total area of its component SSSIs.
Research and the International Biological Programme
In the reserve records is an early paper by Conway outlining the broad aims of the work at Moor House:
1) Understanding of processes of erosion and re-colonisation.
2) The re-creation of a genuine and actively growing upland sphagnum bog.
3) The establishment of marginal scrub and small trees on edges of blanket bog.
4) Drainage experiments on bogs.
5) How to obtain maximum productivity of the land without fire.
It is easy to be dismissive of some the early work but it is important to remember that up until this point, the studies of upland vegetation had been largely descriptive (Pearsall 1964). More or less everything had to start from scratch but that also meant that it was an exciting period to be working not just on Moor House but within the Nature Conservancy, as both the reserve and the organisation began to establish themselves.
The International Biological Programme in 1964 brought a new lease of life to the reserve. This was a world wide study of “Biological Basis of Productivity and Human Welfare.” The Nature Conservancy made contributions to three of the Programme’s Sections which included one major project at Moor House on the productivity of upland peat moss (Sheail 1998) in which Moor House was grouped with tundra sites in North America, Russia and Scandinavia. The breadth of research that has taken place at Moor House is quite staggering covering geology, geography, meteorology and hydrology in addition to biological sciences as well as more recent interdisciplinary studies such as atmospheric chemistry and climate change.
The end of the Field Station
It was ever thus, that whilst the researchers at Moor House chipped away at un-ravelling the secrets of our upland natural heritage, the Field Station, as part of a government organisation was subject to the change, restructuring and “efficiency savings” that carries on today. Surprisingly the incorporation of the Nature Conservancy within the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) in 1965 and the separating of the research arm of the Nature Conservancy into the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE) during the formation of the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) in 1973 did not appear to have had a marked effect in terms of the numbers of publications but the closing of the Field Station in 1979 did.
The closure of the Field Station marked the end of the second chapter of the story of the Reserve and was perhaps inevitable. That it had survived the upheaval that marked the end of the Nature Conservancy in 1973, was down to the fact that it was the reserve base as well as being a field station but from this date it was probably living on borrowed time. By the late 1970s NCC was short of funds and the cost of maintaining the buildings in such harsh environmental conditions was high and modern laboratories require a level of services and instrumentation that could not be provided in such a location.
The images above are the Field Station before (left) and after (right) demolition in 1999. Much of the internal structure had rotted. The rubble was crushed and used to repair the track. The white Portakabin style Field Lab can be seen and this has now been superseded following the conversion of the old generator building into a Field Lab.
The continuing story of Moor House
In the early 2000s, as well as being a focus for research, the reserve has together with its neighbour in Upper Teesdale been used to develop community projects with programmes sponsored by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Northern Rock Foundation. The local primary school children grow and plant out Juniper Juniperus communis seedlings as part of the programme to restore this internationally important habitat. Secondary schools use the reserve as an “outdoor classroom” and in 2006 young people from Eden District were winners of the heritage section of the national Big Draw competition. This work still exists today to lesser extent due to budget cuts, staff changes and other work priorities, but if things improve financially the outreach and education will be hopefully increased.
If the Schools and Community work had been started from the creation of the reserve, one chapter in the history of the site might perhaps have had a different ending. The mid to late 1960s saw Moor House take centre stage in one of the great ecological battles of the 20th century. The story of the compulsory purchase of a corner of the reserve to create Cow Green Reservoir against the advice of the nature conservation community has been told by others (Gregory 1971, Whitby & Willis 1978) but even now more than 40 years later it is a subject that generates passionate debate. In an attempt to make up for the damage, ICI offered £100,000 over ten years for research into the effects of the reservoir on the surrounding area (Clapham 1978). There is little doubt that a great deal of valuable science was carried out as a result but whether it justified the original loss is open to debate. Perhaps when the dam becomes too great a burden to maintain, a bold vision will prevail that leads to its removal and the restoration of the landscape.
A great deal has happened in the seven decades since W H Pearsall wrote his famous opening lines. Today we have a far greater appreciation of the habitats and their possibilities. Building upon this hard-won knowledge and experience, recent investment both financial and it must be said, in partnership with landowners, farmers, commoners associations and other organisations have at last brought about significant improvements in the management of the land.
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