It’s a spectacular place and well worth a visit.
A special area indeed!
A special area but rather underrecorded so if anyone does visit then try to make some observations.
It is slightly less famous for being the conservation cause that brought about the dismantling of the Nature Conservancy Council.
Tell us more please……
The Nature Conservancy Council, the government’s official advisors on wildlife matters, was getting increasingly unpopular in the late 80s for doing its job of designating Sites of Special Scientific Interest. Effigies of NCC staff were burned by landowners in the Somerset Levels. The Secretary of State for the Environment, Nicholas Ridley, had contempt for wildlife conservation. He was out with his mates shooting wild birds one day when someone pointed out a section of saltmarsh where shooting was no longer allowed. It had been bought by RSPB with help from NCC. He went back to his office and wrote a decree that NCC must not grant-aid land purchases if they would lead to curtailment of shooting rights. Meanwhile up in Caithness and Sutherland, vast areas of peat bog were being ploughed, drained and planted with conifers. From memory, by 1988 out of about 90 hydrological basins, only 14 were undamaged by tree planting. There was a double tax break for doing this - you got tax relief for the planting and for holding the land under forestry. So it was very popular with the big land owners and with very high earners who got most of their income tax back by ‘investing’ in forestry. So NCC designating SSSIs there annoyed a lot of the rich and powerful. On top of all that, there was resentment that this distant Peterborough-based quango was interfering in Scottish affairs at a time when Scottish independence was on the rise. The outcome was in 1989 it was announced that NCC would be split up into different bodies for England, Scotland and Wales. There is a more authoritative account in the book Nature’s Conscience, which is a collection of people’s memories of Derek Ratcliffe, NCC’s Chief Scientist in the 80s. Still, the wasteful duplication of posts in the new organisations got me my first permanent job, so it is an ill wind etc.
Thank you, John. I remember the NCC being dissembled but had not taken on the causes behind it, nor the Burning Question.
This has some more, including the designation or Ridley as Secretary of State Against the Environment.