Remembering “Rearing trees in sheep country”

In 1986 Horton-in-Ribblesdale poet Anna Adams (1926-2011) published a collection of poetry called “Trees In Sheep Country”.

On its 40^th anniversary it is worth re-visiting, particularly given the time of year:  we are in the last few weeks of the tree planting season.

By the end of this March, the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority will have planted around 30 hectares of land with native trees this season, at around ten places, through the Grow Back Greener funding scheme being delivered in partnership with the Woodland Trust.

All of it must be protected with stock proof fencing, for as Anna Adams wrote, sheep are “tree-wolves”:

“…in late February, belly’s trouble

drives the sheep wild.  Though bulging big with lamb

they scramble over walls and topple them.

Where one stone falls, soon a wide gate of rubble

“welcomes the eager rabble.  Our young trees

are sweet as sugar-sticks with rising sap,

and tempt the sheep as a self-service shop

tempts children.  Rubber lips stretch up and seize…”

(Excerpt from the poem, “Rearing Trees in Sheep Country”, 1986, Peterloo Poets)

No complaint whatsoever is being made about sheep!  For many people, sheep are part of the essence of the Yorkshire Dales National Park.  I simply wish to quote these verses, since we are now “in late February”, and because they promote understanding of the difficultly of establishing new woodland here.

There is room for plenty more trees in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, provided it is “right tree, right place” to quote the Dales Woodland Strategy.  One of the 40 objectives in the new five-year partnership plan for the National Park is to encourage creation of 6,000 hectares of native broadleaf and mixed woodland over the period from 2020 to 2031.

Woodland cover has been relatively low in this area of England, particularly in the Craven district, for a very long time – for more than a millennium – as I found out while carrying out research for a 2022 blog post, Woodlands in the Dales:  the backstory to the big story.  However, there is evidence that woodland cover shrunk further during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

I’m reading Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley’s 1938 classic book, Wharfedale.  They wrote:

“Trees add their share to the beauty of the valley.  They are everywhere; by the river banks, up the gills, in the meadows.  They range from the stunted bushes, relics of the old forest, which cover the steep hillsides like the thinning hair of an old man’s head, to the giants of their kind which give richness to the lower dale.  A farmer in Littondale in the middle of the last century said:  ‘I can tell the time when a squirrel could hop all the way from Foxhope to Kilnsey without touching the ground once’…”

The Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority is only one of many bodies and individuals involved in creating new woodland each year in the National Park.  To all the farmers and conservationists planting trees in the next few weeks, good luck.