Uplands ready for a big change in emphasis

In March, the Government's rural watchdog, Stuart Burgess, will present his report on what the uplands need – and that will be last official contribution to the debate which will shape election policies.

Farmers hope Dr Burgess will agree it is essential to keep the livestock business going. But whatever he says, and whichever party is in power, the minders of difficult land are going to depend increasingly on funding for environmental services.

One step towards that change of emphasis will be the replacement of Hill Farm Allowance by Uplands Entry Level Stewardship, in the course of 2010, meaning less counting sheep and more counting lapwings.

Also, Natural England has chosen the South Pennines as a demonstration area for experiments in going even further than UELS requires, drawing on various strands of funding for flood and pollution prevention and conservation of wildlife and history. Discussions will start in the New Year on accelerating projects such as filling in the drains which have been drying out moortop peat since the Second World War.

Natural England's Vision for 2060, published in November, made the point that man has been changing the upland landscape for 12,000 years. That was when Stone Age hunters moved into the woodland which covered most of northern England as the last Ice Age melted away.

Stone circles and carvings in stone on Ilkley Moor may reflect their religious beliefs – although they may simply be territorial marking, says Margaret Nieke, a history adviser employed by Natural England.

Five thousand years ago, Neolithic farmers were making clearings for planting. The valleys were still wet, ,and the lighter and better-drained soils of the uplands were easier to work with wood and stone tools, says Dr Nieke. As metal tools came, farming got more organised and the settlers piled field stones in "clearance cairns" or used them to mark boundaries.

Some of their history must be hidden in the moorland peat, which started to build up in a big way in a cool wet period – centred on 3,000 years ago – which meant a lot of plant material rotting in waterlogged soil around the settlements.

Stone axes found on the East Coast have been matched with quarrying in the Langdale Fells of the Lake District, so travelling and trading went on long before the Romans arrived, around 200 AD. But the Romans brought the organising skills which turned tracks into roads and started mining of lead for plumbing in the Dales.

By 1200 AD, man had wiped out the brown bear in England; wolves were on the retreat; monasteries like those at Fountains Abbey, Rievaulx and Meaux, were running sheep on a large scale and the aristocracy was organised enough to reserve areas for hunting deer and boar.

In the 1700s, coal-powered steam started to power deep mining and textile making. In the 1800s, breech-loading shotguns turned grouse shooting into a fashionable hobby and heather moorland into valuable property. And the Yorkshire tourist trade got a kick-start from painters and poets idealising wild upland country.

In the second half of the 20th century, the peat was drained as part of the drive for productivity and subsidies encouraged livestock keeping on poor land. In the first decade of the 21st, concerns about pollution and global warming have dramatically taken over.