Credit: Middlebere Heath, Jon Bish
About the Purbeck Wild Grazing Project
The joined-up vision and collaborative management approach is best developed in a core block of land that encompasses Stoborough heath (NE), Hartland Moor (NE/NT), Slepe Heath (NT) and Arne (RSPB). As from 2022, 1370 ha of this land will have no internal fences, being managed collectively as a single wilded grazing landscape.
The Purbeck Heaths Grazing Unit makes up a 1280Ha fenced area where cattle, horse and pigs will be able to roam free (much like in the New Forest), it comprises roughly 1/3 of the overall Purbeck Heaths NNR.
Thanks to grants from the Green Challenge Recovery Fund & The Wytch Farm Landscape and Access Enhancement Fund, we have installed over 20km of new fences, 78 gates and 7 new cattle grids on surrounding highways.
It encompasses National Trusts & Natural England’s Hartland Slepe, Middlebere and Stoborough Heaths as well as the whole of The RSPB’s Land at Arne.
There will be a mixture of grazing animals, the numbers will change depending on how the habitats are responding, which we will carefully monitor. Initially there will be about 140 cattle, 20 ponies and 10 pigs. As well as these animals, the wild herd of deer in the area will form part of the grazing cohort, each species bringing its own unique way of influencing the habitat that is so special in the Purbeck Heaths.
Before humans started to influence landscapes (about 10,000 years ago, before agriculture started- although some would argue further back than this) it would have been large herbivores that hugely influenced landscapes and the vegetation that occurred on them. Predators that hunted these large herbivores would’ve influenced where their grazing was concentrated- imagine a huge temperate Serengeti! This in turn over millennia would have allowed species to evolve and coexist with these ‘architects’ of the landscapes.
Credit: Mark Singleton_cattle grazing at Corfe Castle
We are a long way from this now in the UK and clearly it’s not possible to take things back to this era. This project aims to mimic the natural processes that would have occurred using modern day ‘proxies’ of these ancient grazing animals, that the wildlife species we see today day would’ve evolved alongside. In this project we will be looking at using cattle to replace the orax, ponies as tarpan and pigs to mimic wild boar.
The trampling, browsing, ripping and earth turning, that these species create are vital to any habitat. In the Purbeck Heaths some of our rarer species like heath tiger beetle, Purbeck mason wasp and sand lizards rely on bare ground. In the past bare ground has been created mechanically by large machinery, it is hoped that this will now be created in a much more natural way, not having to rely on these methods. The action of these animals on vegetation and ground will create a myriad of habitats and niches that will allow our heathland species to thrive with the room to expand into new areas.
Credit: Jake Hancock_cattle grazing Purbeck Heaths
In this area we want to move from our current approach of using cattle to graze in a defined way in order to achieve target conditions for habitats, to installing a wider range of large herbivores that are allowed to behave more naturally as herds, creating a more rich, varied and dynamic mosaic of habitats and microhabitat niches.
We will start with a more naturalistic approach to managing the existing Red Devon cattle, and expand this to include more ponies and pigs during 2022. Numbers of sika deer, for many years seen as a problem due to uncontrolled population growth, have been brought down in recent years and they are also a key component of the guild of grazing animals. This is managed rewilding, applying some of the principles developed at places such as Knepp to make one of our top sites for nature even more diverse, more dynamic, and more resilient.
The vision for wilder grazing is best developed in the Arne-Hartland-Stoborough area; long-term it is hoped that a similar vision can be expanded across much of the rest of the NNR.
Credit: Mark Singleton
Restoring Natural Processes
Restoring larger, better connected habitats is a fundamental principal of nature recovery and brings direct benefits – but we also know that scale alone is not enough. For heathlands to thrive for all their wildlife, they need to be more than mile after mile of uniform heather. At best they are complex mosaics of habitat, with everything from bare ground and open grasslands alongside heaths, scrub and patches of trees – a huge variety of ecological conditions across wet and dry areas that create the specialist niches that wildlife needs.
Our vision for the NNR is to bring back some of the lost processes that will restore and keep creating this variety of conditions for us – and the most important of these is to reintroduce the range of large herbivores that naturally shape the landscape and its ecology.
We’ve been grazing cattle again on the heaths since the 1990s and this has already improved the habitat conditions for many of our native plant and animal species. Our plans for the future involve adding in other types of grazing – introducing pigs and expanding the range of ponies, and better understanding the role played by sika deer. We want to adapt the way we manage our cattle too, with naturalised herd structures that can better mimic how their wild ancestors would have shaped the landscape. In the streams and watercourses we will see how beavers restore the natural hydrology, creating wetlands teeming with wildlife along the way.
The Grazing Unit
The Purbeck Heaths Grazing Unit makes up a 1280Ha fenced area where cattle, horse and pigs will be able to roam free (much like in the New Forest), it comprises roughly 1/3 of the overall Purbeck Heaths NNR.
We have installed over 20km of new fences, 78 gates and 7 new cattle grids on surrounding highways.
It encompasses National Trusts & Natural England’s Hartland Slepe, Middlebere and Stoborough Heaths as well as the whole of The RSPB’s Land at Arne.
The Purbeck Heaths Grazing Unit has been created through a dedicated partnership, with support from the Green Recovery Challenge Fund and the Wytch Farm Landscape and Access Enhancement Fund (WFLF). The Green Recovery Challenge Fund was funded by Defra and has been delivered by The National Lottery Heritage Fund in partnership with Natural England and the Environment Agency.
Credit: John Ferguson_ new cattle grids
