Upland Wales on the brink of a radically different future

This article, written by Tim Bonner, first appeared in Shooting Times magazine.

As often as I can, but not often enough, I head up into the Cambrian mountains with my friend Dai where we walk empty miles, catch wild trout from remote llyns and burn peat to warm our souls. Our base is a hut built well over a hundred years ago by a club made up of local farmers, solicitors, doctors and the like which still exists and of which Dai is a member.

Back then there were grouse to be shot in August and September, as well as the trout. Never many, but enough for a dinner or two and sustainable for the first 80 years or so of the club’s existence. There are still a very few grouse in the wilder parts of this remote area, but shooting stopped years ago. Not because they had shot too many, but because there were too few to shoot.

We were up in early June and the hill was quiet. The golden plover which once bred there are long gone and although we heard a curlew a couple of years ago there was no sign of them this summer. Even the swallow’s nest in the outside loo with a well-worn wooden seat and a fine view of the mountains was empty for the first time for years.

A pair of crested grebes was nesting at the top of the big lake, but otherwise red kites doing circuits of the hill, the odd crow and alien Canada geese were the only visible bird life.

It is not immediately obvious what has changed since grouse were numerous enough to harvest and plover piped from every hilltop.

Dai is a hunting man at heart and followed hounds across these mountains for decades on foot or a pony. Those packs don’t exist now, the snare is about to be banned and anyway there is no-one to set them or to sit out on these hills for night after night. As farming has changed in the hills the fox has gone from being public enemy number one to a nuisance which is tolerated.

Sheep have been here for centuries and made the monks of the local abbeys rich with their wool. Numbers famously peaked in the late 20^th Century thanks to European headage payments, but there are many fewer now. There are cattle on the hill, and wild ponies, as there have been for centuries.

Dai is a proper countryman from farming stock who has spent the last few years actively trying to revive biodiversity in another part of upland Wales. His tools include the modern code compliant snare, the crow trap and the rifle, but he feels he is fighting a losing battle. He builds biodiversity, and in doing so sucks in predators in endless numbers. Foxes and crows he can at least keep removing, but not the birds of prey which feast on the abundance he creates.

Meanwhile, probably for the first time since the monks cornered the market in wool, money is swirling around the Welsh hills. The potential for monetising carbon sequestration is driving huge investment in marginal agricultural land which is being brought for tree planting and rewilding.

Little has changed in these mountains for centuries, but it is difficult to see how they, like the rest of upland Wales, are not on the brink of a radically different future. What is less certain is what that will mean for the farmers, the sheep, the curlew, the plover, the last few grouse and the other inhabitants of this rare wilderness.

We came off the hill in June, having caught some trout and not seen another soul for half a week back into a world where the Welsh government is consulting on the licensing of pheasants and partridges, banning snaring and buying up productive farmland to plant trees on. Whatever the answers are for upland Wales it is clear that the Welsh government is not going to provide them.