The Conservation Prison - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 213

as if trying to force their way back into the soil. There was no sound
but the wind in the trees.
I walked back into the moors. In brilliant sunshine I climbed Banc
Bugeilyn, the hill overlooking the lake. It gave me an excellent vantage
point. To the south massed Pumlumon: stubby, ragged in outline, pale
khaki, like the rest of the land. I could see perhaps a quarter of the
conservation area. I scanned the whole view carefully with my binocu-
lars. I noted the clump of trees around the old farmhouse; one small
cluster of sallow beside the lake; two more Sitka spruce trees and a few
rowans clinging to a wall of the ravine too steep for the sheep to reach.
Otherwise, the whole landscape, perhaps 2,000 hectares of this cele-
brated site, was treeless. Around me were signs of peat erosion caused
by heavy grazing: little cliffs of black soil from which the surrounding
bog had shrunk. Something had gone horribly wrong here.
I returned to the car, feeling empty and miserable. I turned on the igni-
tion, removed the handbrake and set off down the road. After fifty yards
I slammed on the brakes, parked as close to the edge of the narrow road
as I could and jumped out again. I could scarcely believe what I had seen.
The sward on the verge was an exuberance of colours as rich as the
Lord Mayor's Show. Here were drooping red spikes of sorrel, golden
bird's foot trefoil like Quaker bonnets, the delicate umbels of pignut,
heath milkwort - some pink, some blue - red campion and cut-leaved
cranesbill. Here were little white flowers of eyebright, with egg yolk
on their tongues, dark figworts, which released a foxy smell when I
ran my hand through them, purple knapweed, pink and white yarrow,
foxglove, mouse ear, male fern, deep cushions of bedstraw, wild
raspberry, heath speedwell, hogweed and willowherb. Growing
through the sward were little saplings of sallow and rowan.
A few hundred yards further along the road I stopped again. Taller
rowans and sallows were growing on the verge, as well as hawthorn
and elder. Around them the heather rose above my waist. The bilberries
were covered in fat dark fruit and thick with cuckoospit. Small heath
butterflies, little pale moths and chironomid midges swarmed around
the plants. A bracken chafer in electric colours - a green iridescent head
and thorax, bright copper elytra - crawled over the bilberry flowers, its
strange three-ingered antennae sweeping this way and that.
This, I realized, was what I had seen in other parts of the mountains.