Sheepwrecked - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 157

and oral traditions of Wales. Farmers moved their flocks between hen-
dre - literally 'old town' (the winter grazings surrounding the
farmstead) - and hafod , rough huts in the summer pastures on the
hills, some of which eventually became solid stone houses. (I have
seen a similar system in Transylvania, where, in the late 1990s, shep-
herds who rode fine black horses still slept in summer houses, or
stînas , of sticks and shakes in the mountains, milked their sheep and
cows in the pastures, made a white cheese which they hung in bags
from the rafters, drank plum brandy and sang around the fire at
night.) Drovers walked the sheep along ancient tracks into England,
driving the flocks from the Welsh uplands to markets as distant as
Kent. Shepherds bred dogs and trained them to perform astonishing
feats. Most of this has now gone, or persists - in the form of sheepdog
trials - as little more than a ghost of the economy it once served.
Subsidies after the Second World War encouraged the farmers to
increase the size of their flocks. Between 1950 and 1999, the number
of sheep in Wales rose from 3.8 to 11.6 million. After headage pay-
ments - grants for every animal a farmer kept - were stopped in 2003,
the population fell back again, to 8.2 million by 2010, 6 which is still
almost three sheep for every human being in Wales.
Since the Second World War, sheep have reduced what remained of
the upland flora to stubble. In 6,000 years, domestic animals (along-
side burning and clearing for crops and the cutting of trees for wood,
bark and timber) transformed almost all the upland ecosystems of
Britain from closed canopy forest to open forest, from open forest to
scrub and from scrub to heath and long sward. In just sixty years, the
greatly increased flocks in most of the upland areas of Britain com-
pleted the transformation: turning heath and prairie into something
resembling a bowling green with contours.
Though sheep numbers have begun to decline, the impacts have
not. More powerful machinery allows farmers to erase patches of
scrub growing on land that was previously too steep to clear. This
allows them to expand the area that qualifies for subsidies. In
mid-Wales some farmers appear to retain a powerful compulsion, as
they sometimes put it, to 'tidy up' the land. Ancient hawthorns and
crab apples close to my home, often the last remnants of the last
hedges on hills that are otherwise devoid of trees, are still being ripped