The Carrifran Wildwood in the Southern Uplands. This aims to recreate an ancient wooded landscape within a 1620 acre valley in the Moffat Hills.
Since 2000, over 750,000 native trees and shrubs have been planted and sheep/goats have been excluded from the valley to the best of their abilities.
Whilst the site is undoubtedly a gold mine for birds, we botanists look on all tree planting projects over ancient grassland with suspicion and I was sceptical about the whole concept.
There are some really valuable open upland/montane habitats round here and I suspected the concept arose from the popular notion that these open landscapes are "barren" due to over grazing.
Indeed, overgrazing is a bad thing and damaged much of the uplands are. But grazing IS an important of ecosystem disturbance dynamics. Under modern thinking we understand that herbivores are ESSENTIAL components in rewilding schemes.
I was pleased to see the planting had been planned artfully. Species selection aimed to create a selection of upland NVC upland woodland and montane scrub communities likely to have been present in the ancient past and included some interesting species like eared, dark leaved and dwarf willow, burnet rose, cloudberry, juniper. All were sourced from as local provenance seed stock and cuttings as possible.
They aimed to create W7, W11 W17, W19 amd W20 Upland oak-birch woodland,
There were no straight lines. No sense of the artificial. It did indeed look like a self set community and had been designed as a mosaic of dense and sparse vegetation and open ground.
This is fab... .mosaics are what most of our wildlife is adapted to. We need more habitat designers to look and learn from this.
But the issue that plagued me was the absolute absence of grazing.
A planned mosaic is inherently unstable. With no management, its open areas will inevitably turn to scrub, then wood, in a transition that can take as little as 5 years!
As I looked over the views I saw vast areas of tussocky grass dominated by a few coarse species (namely cocksfoot and Yorkshire fog) amongst increasingly dense stands of bracken which I fear will be suppressing less competitive elements of the former flora.
BUT.
My exploration was only a short scoping mission and I didn't get anywhere near the upper slopes or summits. Plus it's a bit harsh to judge any grassland in mid January.....
I can say nothing until I go back in May for a better look.
A Google search tells of flourishing tall herb and river gravel communities in the valleys, with Boreal heath transitioning to Alpine heath developing on the upper slopes. Ferns, mosses, lichens and fungi have also responded to the increased structural complexity.
Indeed, there is a distinct tall herb community developing in places.....This may be one I recall seeing in the Moffat Hills SAC designation - Annex 1 6430 Hydrophilous tall herb communities of plains and the montane to alpine levels. This is more traditionally associated with ledges due to its being restricted by grazing so it could feasibly be more cosmopolitan in distribution here.
All I could see at the time was a lot of great willowherb (Epilobium hirsutum), which can indicate both interesting and less distinct wetter grassland habitats.
My revisit in May will see if anything fun from the Annex 1 community is there or if it's just a coarse product of undergrazing.
Epiphytic lichens were building a strong front in the branches of the scrub, setting the stage for something that may one day be quite Wistmans woody in effect.
Ultimately, I look forward to getting back up here in May and having some time to climb up hiiighhhhh 😁
More info on bordersforesttrust.org
And Moffat Hills SAC citation (JNCC).
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