‘Nature’s church’: living cowpats and rainforests transform Exmoor national park
“What we want is cowpats that are alive – you can see the evidence here,” says Holly Purdey, pointing at dung beetle holes. She took on the 81-hectare (200-acre) Horner farm in Exmoor national park in 2018, challenging herself to produce beef and lamb while restoring nature to land she says had been “trashed” by intensive farming.
In the field of knee-high grass, her shorthorn cattle are sheltering from the sun by the tall hedges. Water scavenger beetles also feed on the dung, she says, and eat the larvae of the face flies that can torment the red and white cattle and are usually tackled with pesticides. “I think it’s incredible that we have a natural predator for the flies,” Purdey says.
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The field is buzzing with the sound of crickets and grasshoppers, and swallows swoop to scoop up insects. “As the cattle walk through, they kick the insects up,” she says.
Exmoor national park, like all of England’s national parks, has failed to protect nature since they were set up 75 years ago. Only 15% of Exmoor’s sites of special scientific interest are in favourable condition.
One reason is that most national park land is privately owned by farmers, who embraced fertiliser and pesticide-fuelled intensification in past decades, decimating wildlife. The parks own a tiny proportion of the land and have few powers outside planning controls.
But Purdey is trying to reconcile farming and fauna. Her field also houses beehives, newly planted apple and pear trees, willow to produce winter fodder for sheep, and a mobile chicken trailer. The trailer is moved every day or two, so the chicken droppings help restore calcium in the depleted soil.
Monitoring of the grasslands, butterflies, bats and reptiles show nature is recovering on the farm. “We can produce food in harmony with nature – I am seeing it,” she says. “And building a farm more in tune with nature is more resilient to climate change.”
Purdey, who was raised on a farm, before training in conservation and working for Somerset wildlife trust, is also re-establishing wildflower meadows. More diverse pasture is good for nature and the livestock, she says: “They will have better gut health, and they can self-medicate, for example with yarrow, which is anti-inflammatory.”
Farmers in national parks, where the land is generally poorer for food production, have in the past received fewer subsidies than those outside. But a new focus on using public money for public goods is starting to shift that. Being in a national park has given Purdey access to farming in protected landscape (FiPL) grants, which have part-paid for her nature work.
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“Me and [my husband] Mark at different times have said we need to give it up, due to the financial struggle of raising a young family while trying to build something from the ground up,” says Purdey. But her enthusiasm soon returns: “The farm is slowly flourishing – that has taken time and trusting in nature to deliver.”
Creating more woodland is a vital part of recovering nature in national parks. In Exmoor, woodland cover increased by about 1% from 2015 to 2020, to 14%. But Graeme McVittie, the park’s senior woodland officer, is working hard to accelerate that, with research suggesting up to half the park could be wooded.
In Burridge Woods, near Dulverton, he says: “This was absolutely packed with rhododendron 30 years ago – people even used to come on bus tours to see it.” The damaging invasive species has been relentlessly hacked back and, today, the trees that can grow in its wake are an oasis for pied flycatcher birds, Bechstein’s bats and tiger crane flies.
Challenges remain, from other invasive species such as cherry laurel and buddleia, as well as ash dieback and grey squirrel damage. “They strip the bark to get at the sugary sap,” says McVittie. He hopes pine martens can be reintroduced to tackle the tree rodents.
In the heart of Exmoor, at Simonsbath village, a 20-year project is under way to recreate 300 hectares of temperate rainforest, dripping with moss, lichen and ferns. “It’s a hyper-oceanic climate here – that means it rains a lot,” McVittie says.
A 6-hectare wood was planted over the winter: a mix of oak, mountain ash, birch, hazel and hawthorn. “I’m really pleased these are doing so well,” he says, examining the oak leaves poking out of the biodegradable tube that protects the sapling from deer. “This place has been deforested for centuries, and without help the native species will never find their way back.”
Near the coast, another site, Hawkcombe woods, provides the country’s best woodland site for the heath fritillary butterfly, reintroduced in 2014. The shady slopes are peppered with the delicate yellow trumpets of crested cow wheat, the plant the butterflies feed on.
The oak woods were coppiced for hundreds of years to produce charcoal and tanbark, to tan leather. Today, careful coppicing continues to create the light and shade needed for its biodiversity and McVittie dreams of grazing animals one day doing this work.
“You could really see bison in here, and some longhorn cattle, thrashing around and making a mess for the first time in 1,000 years,” he says, adding that animals have been fenced out of the valleys to protect new trees and fenced in on the moors, meaning no new trees grow: “We need to mix it up a bit.”
At West Ilkerton farm, a windswept 102-hectare site on a hill 1,000 ft above the Bristol channel, traditional farm animals are playing a part in a shift to a more natural landscape.
“These are proper neolithic beasties,” says Sarah Eveleigh, as the farmer’s stocky Exmoor horn rams jostle around her, sporting heavy, curling horns. “They are very traditional breeds, very well suited for the area, and the breed line here has been on this farm for over 100 years. We get heavy driving rain and wind, and snow as well, so the restored hedges provide really nice shelter for them,” she says, and for the red ruby Devon cattle.
“But we’re actually much lower stocked than we used to be,” she says, with half the sheep and a third of the cattle. “Most of the valleys were all grazed when I was young. But we’ve let them come up naturally as woodland. All these trees have grown up in my lifetime.” FiPL grants have also part-funded fencing of a wildlife site and a wildlife walk.
“We’re trying to find a really good middle ground between supporting nature and food production, while having a profitable business,” Everleigh says. “At the minute, livestock farming in general isn’t a profitable business.”
Everleigh walks up a lane edged with the tree-topped earth-and-stone walls unique to the West Country, where the canopies arch together overhead. “This is one of my favourite parts of the farm – it’s like nature’s church.”
The next field holds Exmoor ponies, brought down from the common moorland to graze. “Sheep, cattle and the ponies all graze slightly differently,” says Everleigh. “So they complement each other. Up on the moor, the ponies do a really good job. They keep bits of ground quite open and create a really nice diversity of sward heights for different invertebrates and birds.”
A new management agreement for the 364-hectare common on the moor is working, she says: “The state of it had just plummeted and it was just overtaken totally with gorse and bracken. Now there’s some really lovely heather up there.”
Exmoor is one of the few national parks that has a nature recovery plan, including ambitious and detailed recovery targets for 2030, as well one to ensure that at least 75% of the park is “nature-rich” by 2050.
Everleigh, the fourth generation to work her farm, says: “There seems to be an ‘us and them’ between conservationists and farmers,” she says. “But farmers are conservationists, we know how the land works, so we need to be consulting each other all the time.
“We are going to have to think differently to how we have always farmed. But the government has to recognise what we are already doing for the countryside.”
