About 140 years before its designation as a national park, William Wordsworth described the Lake District as “a sort of national property in which every man has a right and an interest”. Like other English national parks, however, this one is mostly in private hands. It also lacks the wilderness associated with designated landscapes elsewhere. But it is firmly a public asset: loved by millions, and subject to the demands of landowners, tenants, taxpayers and visitors from around the world. For generations these demands have centred on agricultural heritage and aesthetics, but increasingly prominent on the list of “what the Lake District ought to do for us” are ecosystem services such as carbon storage, water management and biodiversity.
Lee Schofield is a country boy who grew into an ecologist and conservationist, and as such he embodies the “messy middle” in the old and wearisome war between town and country. He’s an easy person to like – thoughtful, quietly spoken, a watcher and listener, a writer and singer of folky songs. But he’s found himself in a place and a job in which perhaps his most important characteristic is resilience. The place is Haweswater in the north-eastern edge of the Lake District national park, and the job is overseeing the ecological restoration of a landscape on behalf of the RSPB, who rent the land from United Utilities. The site includes Haweswater reservoir and two traditional hill farms.
To the ecologist’s eye, centuries of sheep grazing on these fells have created a denuded landscape. To Schofield, it is a landscape of ghosts: those of pine martens, corncrakes and black grouse, and golden eagles (the last in England, a lone male, lived here until 2015), and everywhere the shadows of lost woodlands and absent alpine flowers. Of these, a few species cling on by the narrowest of margins, national rarities, relegated to remote crags inaccessible to grazing animals, in particular sheep. His job is not only to restore biodiversity and abundance, and the ability of the land to hold water and carbon, but to prove that it can be done alongside traditional farming.
Reducing the number of sheep is hugely controversial, not least because of the practical implications for neighbouring farms. The high ground where sheep spend the summer is common land and stock are hefted, which is to say they learn to stick to their patch without being fenced in. A lighter grazing regime creates grass that is literally greener, not to mention studded with diverse and delicious herbs: an irresistible temptation to animals on adjacent hefts. Other objections are deeply cultural. Hill farming heritage is imprinted on lives as well as landscape here, and in pursuit of the recent Unesco world heritage site designation of the Lake District, proponents have committed to the preservation of cultural heritage even where it is at odds with climate and biodiversity considerations. As a measure of the mismatch, consider that the presence of the RSPB at Haweswater was described by a member of the world heritage site steering group as a wart on the face of the bid.
It’s a relief to leave the contested fells for a bit, to glimpse other ways of farming hills. In sojourns to Norway and the Italian Alps, Schofield describes highly traditional farms operating in biodiverse landscapes – energising intimations of what might be.
No one person and no one organisation can bring about the necessary change, but Schofield is doing more than most, and the vision he paints, of a fecund, collaborative, ecologically and economically sustainable future, is worth swallowing some pride for on both sides. The ranks of farmers willing to embrace or at least consider change swell year on year, and Lee is supported by a thriving local conservation community.
The results speak for themselves. In summer, the hay meadows of this part of the park are a flickering, bobbing sea of flowers and butterflies, and the once canalised Swindale Beck now jinks around its old meandering course, glinting over clean gravels where salmon are spawning again. Schofield is a delightfully companionable guide – evoking huge vistas alongside small, exquisite, multisensory details – you can almost inhale the scent of thyme and warm rock wafting from the pages.
• Wild Fell: fighting for Nature on a Lake District Hill Farm by Lee Schofield is published by Transworld (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
