ABSTRACT
Heather and grass moorland covers a third of the land surface of Britain: it is not in short supply. Nor is it unique to Britain: much vaster expanses of moorland blanket tracts of Scandinavia, Russia and Canada. Yet in Britain, the moors have captured a unique place in the imagination of many members of the countryside establishment. So much so, that the idea of protecting moorland has dominated countryside policy-making for almost the whole of the post-war period – at the expense of other types of landscape whose need has been greater. All ten of our national parks, for instance, have been selected to enshrine moorland, even though the official criteria for park designation suggest that remote moorland is far from the ideal candidate for national park status. While these parks were being designated, Britain’s traditional lowland countryside – the patchwork quilt of fields, woods, downs and marshlands, separated by hedgerows, banks and winding streams – was undergoing a mounting onslaught from agricultural change. This lowland countryside is England’s most distinctive landscape type, and survey evidence suggests it is the type most popular with the general public.
