Sheepwrecked - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 156

outdated. While sheep were used in Wales as an instrument of enclos-
ure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during the twentieth
there was a partial but widespread process of land reform in the
uplands. In the aftermath of David Lloyd George's People's Budget of
1909, which increased income tax and inheritance tax for the very
rich, the big landowners in Wales, many of whom were English, began
to sell off some of their property. 4 They appear to have been less
attached to their Welsh estates than to their English properties or their
sporting land in Scotland, so these were shed first. Much of the land
was bought by their tenants. Partly as a result, a smaller proportion of
Wales than of England or Scotland remains in large estates. As the
farmer Dafydd Morris-Jones, with whom I have discussed these issues
at length, pointed out to me: 'there is a great sense of national pride in
the fact that the local population, after centuries of subservience, were
able to reclaim “their” lands, and were no longer beholden to the lord
of the manor'.
After the Second World War, through the 1947 Agriculture Act and
the 1948 Agricultural Holdings Act, the tenant farmers who con-
tinued to rent their land gained security for life. For eighty or ninety
years, until quite recently, much of the land in Wales was controlled
by small farmers, most of whom raised sheep and cattle. (The cattle
gradually disappeared, partly, it seems, as a result of the loss of the
suckler cow premium - a European subsidy - in 2003.) During a
period in which it faced mortal threats, they sustained the Welsh lan-
guage and important elements of the national culture. Now the family
farms are consolidating rapidly, into new agricultural estates. Despite
the £3.6 billion a year British people spend ostensibly to sustain a
viable farm economy, the National Farmers' Union reports that '21%
of upland farms are not expected to continue beyond the next 5 years.' 5
The brief flowering of small-scale farming appears to be coming to
an end.
Until the enclosures, Welsh farmers kept large numbers of cattle
and goats in the uplands, and grew cereals, root crops and hay, even,
in some places, on the tops of the hills. By the end of the nineteenth
century, and the coming of the railways, much of this mixed farming
had been replaced by sheep and cattle. The enclosures consolidated a
grazing culture which still resonates through the place names, ballads