Tony Whitehead
“The fact that undergrazing is having a negative impact on the natural environment of various parts of the commons is supported by firsthand experience of council members, many of whom have worked the commons of Dartmoor a daily basis for much of their lives and continue to do so”
Report prepared by the Chairman of Dartmoor Commoners Council for a meeting on 4 December 2024
I am in complete agreement with the chair of Dartmoor Commoners Council.
Much of Dartmoor’s central Blanket Bogs, particularly on the Forest of Dartmoor Common (a huge area of the moor owned by the Duchy of Cornwall), are in very poor condition and have come to be dominated by Purple Moor Grass, aka “Molinia.”
In Europe, blanket bogs are found primarily in the UK and Ireland, and Dartmoor is the southernmost location for this habitat. A blanket bog is a type of peatland that forms in cool, wet climates, covering large areas of land with waterlogged, acidic, and nutrient-poor soil.
Natural England’s (NE) site designation details for North Dartmoor SSSI list one of the key pressures as “undergrazing”. In an extensive site check carried out by NE in 2019 the following is written in comments for the condition of the blanket bogs:
In most cases the driver of poor condition seems to be the expansion of Molinia in both mires and heaths and this may reflect a combination of insufficient grazing in the main growing season, but also probably the continuing effects of historical drainage and/or turbary, perhaps in combination with climate change and nitrogen deposition.
This is very clear. However, what’s important to understand is that Molinia is not actually the root cause of poor condition; it is a symptom that expresses poor condition. The fundamental cause of the blanket bogs not flourishing is the appalling condition of Dartmoor’s peatlands.
This condition is largely due to historic peat cutting as well as historic overgrazing and associated management practices such as burning. This has caused extensive erosion and significantly altered the hydrology of the peat, lowering the water table, suiting the deep-rooted Molinia and allowing it to outcompete the mosses that do not thrive when the peat is degraded. Read more here about all this.
The grass is then given a further boost both by nitrogen deposition - it basically rains fertilizer on the moor - and an element of climate change.
The Molinia, favoured by the eroded peat, has “swamped out” what should be the key features of a healthy blanket bog – sphagnum, heathers, cotton grass, sundew, and so on. Anyone who regularly walks up there can see this or experience it while stumbling through knee-deep Molinia tussocks!
And “undergrazing”? How does that fit in?
Molinia is a bit of an odd grass in that it dies back entirely in winter and, therefore, is only palatable for livestock in the spring and summer months. Sheep largely avoid it (with, I’m told, the exception of a few specialist hardy breeds such as Hebridean sheep, of which there are very few on Dartmoor).
Cattle and ponies, however, will graze it in the warmer months, with the additional benefit that their pulling and trampling of the sward can open up the ground between tussocks to allow other plants to flourish. But they have to be encouraged to do this as Molinia is not top of their list of favourite grasses - if they are not encouraged, they tend to avoid it, and you end up with “undergrazing” in areas where the grass really gets hold.
Two things are therefore necessary to restore the blanket bogs and get a handle on the Molina. The first is to rewet the peat; the second is to actively encourage cattle to graze it in Summer. Problem, solution – great. Restoration works to rewet the peat have been taking place since 2009 and great work is being done. But what about the grazing?
Cash for Cattle
In May 2012, the then-Defra Secretary of State, Caroline Spelman, proudly announced the launch of the Forest of Dartmoor Common Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) Agreement. As the Government press release said:
The Dartmoor agreement is one of the largest agri-environment agreements in Europe and is part of Natural England’s Environmental Stewardship Higher Level Scheme, which is funded by the EU and UK Government. The annual payments will help to safeguard a viable future for the commoners on Dartmoor, as well as delivering habitat enhancement of blanket bog, upland heath and species rich grassland habitats.
It agreed to pay £13M over ten years to Dartmoor commoners with grazing rights on the Forest Common. In return, the taxpayer who was funding this would get healthy blanket bogs and so on.
Central to delivering “enhancement” was a plan for dealing with the Molina. In 2021 I asked to see the agreement and was sent the then latest version. It’s long, but you can read it here. The agreement is clear (p56) about the need to tackle the Molinia, not just because it’s affecting the condition of the blanket bog, but the knock-on effect it’s having of forcing stock elsewhere, particularly when it’s unpalatable. This leads to overgrazing of the outer commons.
The plan is then clear (also p56) about what needs to happen:
To help address this we first need to break up the dense Molinia thatch that prevents stock accessing the areas and protects the new growth from being grazed whilst it is palatable. We then need to graze the Molinia to prevent it reforming the thatch.
We propose to encourage cattle into the Molinia dominated areas using feed blocks/buckets, molasses, cobs or lumps of rock salt to trample the vegetation and create tracks.
And that to help further to get the stock in the right place:
Increased shepherding will take place to ensure livestock use the tracks created by this plan and graze/trample the Molinia around the tracks to break up the Molinia thatch and improve biodiversity.
It was also determined that “Cattle will be the only or main grazing species from 1 May to 31 October. They will comprise at least 50% of the livestock unit grazing days on the parcel.” (p50). To support this, a special cattle grazing supplement (code HR1) was agreed. In 2021 and 2022, the commoners, via the Commons Association, were paid each year £390,360.25 for this cattle grazing supplement (p5 of the agreement).
This is precisely what is needed to help deal with the Molinia. Very detailed stocking calendars were drawn up for each management area within the Forest Common to guide this. I was sent these via another EIR request in February 2025 and you can read them here.
On the Forest Common, it was agreed that starting in May, there were to be 1672 cattle (including heifers), rising to 2226 in July and 2079 in August and falling back to 1372 in October before the animals were taken off. Properly shepherded, this should have been more than enough to start dealing with the Molina.
Where are all the cattle?
The Forest of Dartmoor Common site check of 2019, seven years into the agreement, gave no indication of any resulting improvement to the state of the habitats. The site check results were sent as part of an EIR request, and you can read them here, but the key finding was:
Cover of Purple Moor-grass (Molinia caerulea) was estimated in the area surrounding each quadrat. The average recorded cover across all habitats was 55%. This breaks down to Bogs 60%, Dry heath 35%, Wet heath 56%.
That’s a lot of Molinia still, especially on the bogs. The supposition being:
[The] figures are all consistent with insufficient grazing during the period when Molinia is more palatable and the consequent shading and build-up of thatch are likely to contribute to all of the more significant attribute failures…
Further:
Around half of all quadrats showed some evidence of grazing, though in many cases this was just a few nibbled stems, some dung or hoofprints of indeterminate age. Only eight quadrats had “many” livestock nearby, fourteen had “several”, twenty-six had “few” and at the remaining ninety-two stops no livestock were visible nearby.
This survey was carried out in August 2019. Dartmoor is a very open landscape. There should have been 2079 cattle on the common. And yet at 92 stops, picked at random, “no livestock were visible nearby”.
Where the surveyors were seeing stock:
Early indications are that the majority of those areas where many or several livestock were noted were on lower ground in the north and east of the North Dartmoor units and in the northwest of the South Dartmoor units (i.e. sheltered areas closer to farms).
To summarise, while there were some cattle out on the common, there were very few on the Molinia where they needed to be. Hence, the “insufficient grazing.”
The NE area team picked up this issue with the Forest of Dartmoor Commoners Association in an email sent in September 2019 (also obtained through EIR Request, available here p22):
I have no further emails, so I don’t know the outcome of any meetings. However, five years later, this same issue is referenced in NE’s evidence to the Fursden Review in 2023 (p53 here):
the Forest of Dartmoor agreement (11,000ha) [...] for the last 10 years has reported summer grazing levels at 70 to 80% of levels allowed within the agreement (from records collated by the agreement administrator). This combination of reduced cattle numbers and grazing cattle late in the summer has contributed to local undergrazing and an increase in Molinia.
In essence, this is saying that there is a percentage allowance in the stocking calendar, and the cattle put on the moor have always been at the low end of that allowance. And this has contributed to the increase in Molinia.
Further, and crucially:
… decisions on stock numbers within the agreed maxima and minima appear to be driven by agricultural considerations rather than the requirement to deliver agreement outcomes.
What is to be done?
There has been a lot of criticism that NE is “anti-grazing”. However, here, on the largest of the Dartmoor Commons, a very well-funded agreement has been in place for over a decade precisely to encourage grazing with the right numbers of cattle at the right time of year to deal with the Molinia. But it appears according to NE’s evidence, that some of the commoners' “agricultural considerations" have meant that the right cattle numbers may have never really been put in the right places.
As we move forward, with the new Dartmoor Land Management Group now convened, it’s vital that we examine how much these “agricultural considerations” are a barrier to nature’s recovery on Dartmoor and what needs to be done to address this.
Dartmoor’s priority is how it can deliver on nature and carbon. Money and support must be made available to those with the skills, imagination, understanding, and willingness to tackle this. This can work and benefit everyone. But nature has to be put first, and if public money is going to be used, it must only be paid where it can evidenced to be focused on the delivery of outcomes for nature recovery. And agreements must only be signed if it is certain those signing can deliver the work.
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