The Heath: Moor or less

The "Wilderness" That Isn't

When we look at a sprawling lowland heath, we often see a "wild" landscape—a slice of nature left to its own devices. However, this is an ecological illusion. Lowland heaths are actually  plagioclimax communities , meaning they are "man-manipulated" stages of nature rather than self-sustaining wilderness.

Historically, these landscapes were shaped by commoners who cut fuel, harvested turf, and grazed livestock. Today, those traditional economic drivers are gone, but the habitat remains entirely dependent on human activity. Without constant, active intervention, the natural process of ecological succession would take over. Invasive birch, pine, and bracken would quickly choke out the heather, turning a rare open-ground habitat into secondary woodland and driving away the specialist species that live there. To save these landscapes, we have to manage them—and that management is more high-tech and scientific than you might think.

The Botanical Reset: Why We Set Fire to the Landscape

It may seem counter-intuitive to set fire to a nature reserve, but for heather, fire is a lifeline. To maximize biodiversity, conservationists aim to maintain a "mosaic age profile" for heather ( Calluna vulgaris ). This means ensuring the landscape has a mix of four distinct growth stages: pioneer, building, mature, and degenerate. While "degenerate" sounds negative, it is a natural part of the cycle where the heather becomes leggy and sparse; however, it eventually requires a reset to prevent the habitat from transitioning into scrubland.

To reset this cycle, managers use  swailing  (controlled burning) or strategic cutting. This returns the shrubs to the highly biodiverse pioneer phase. Interestingly,  Calluna vulgaris  has evolved to thrive with fire; its seeds possess a natural chemical inhibitor on their coats that prevents germination. Only the intense heat of a surface fire can melt or strip this layer away, acting as a literal "starter pistol" for new growth.

This process is governed by strict scientific timing, occurring only between November and February. This window ensures that hibernating adders are safe underground and that breeding birds—whose season begins in March—are not disturbed.

"Because these habitats are now completely decoupled from the traditional farming economics that originally created them... active, science-based intervention is mandatory." —  The guiding philosophy of the Pebblebed Heaths conservation teams.

Conservation via Smartphone: The "Invisible" Fence

One of the greatest challenges in modern heathland management is grazing. Traditional fences are often unsightly and can be legally problematic on protected common land. On  Fire Beacon Hill , the grazing project has solved this using a high-tech approach:  "NoFence" GPS collars .

Using these collars on cattle, conservationists can program "invisible fences" directly from a smartphone. This allows for "mob-grazing," where livestock are kept in specific, targeted areas to break up dense vegetation. This is not guesswork; the impact is monitored through rigorous  systematic plant surveys , such as those conducted in 2022, which map exactly how the grazing affects the botanical community. This technology allows managers to restore the landscape without the need for physical barriers, respecting both historical land rights and the aesthetic of the open heath.

Nature’s Heavy Lifters: The Cattle and Pony Engineering Team

While technology helps manage the herd, the animals themselves act as ecological engineers. Hardy breeds like  Belted Galloway cattle  and native  Exmoor and Dartmoor ponies  provide a "Habitat Balancing" act. While the ponies excel at maintaining the structural balance between gorse and heather, the cattle are essential for more specialised tasks:

• The Southern Damselfly:  This endangered insect relies on cattle to maintain its home in the "black bog rush mires"—dark, waterlogged peatlands. The heavy hooves of the cattle trample thick vegetation to create "runnels," or open water channels, that would otherwise choke up and disappear.

• The Bare Sand Specialists:  By trampling the ground, cattle expose patches of bare sand. These sun-warmed spots are vital for basking adders and common lizards. They also provide essential nesting sites for solitary burrowing bees and wasps.

The Axe and the Spade: The Strategic Removal of Trees

In most environmental contexts, cutting down trees is seen as a negative. On a heathland, it is a conservation necessity. Many of the trees currently found on these heaths are the result of coniferous plantations established on sites like  Bulverton Hill  and  Greystone Hill  during a post-WWII timber shortage in the 1950s.

Removing these 20th-century plantations allows the original dry dwarf shrub heath and ground flora, like bilberry, to reclaim the hillsides. In some cases, management goes even deeper through "soil scraping." Because decomposing leaves enrich the soil over time, managers must physically remove the nutrient-rich topsoil to restore the low-nutrient, highly acidic conditions heather needs.

This creates a fascinating conservation irony: to save the prehistoric landscape of the heath through soil scraping, managers must work with surgical precision to avoid destroying the actual prehistoric structures—such as Bronze Age burial barrows—that have remained undisturbed on the commons for millennia.

The Unburnable Invader: Why Fire Fails Against Bracken

While fire is a tool for rejuvenating heather, it is a weapon for  bracken . This aggressive, deep-rooted invader cannot be controlled by swailing. Bracken possesses subterranean rhizomes that are unaffected by surface flames. In fact, burning the landscape often helps bracken spread by removing the competing surface vegetation, giving the invader a clear path to take over. This makes bracken management a unique challenge that requires manual clearance rather than the help of fire.

A Managed Future

The survival of our heathlands depends entirely on active management and collaborative partnerships. Landscapes like  Mutter’s Moor  (54 hectares) only thrive because of the coordination between Clinton Devon Estates and the Pebblebed Heaths Conservation Trust. Similar success is seen at Fire Beacon Hill through the partnership between Sidmouth Town Council and the RSPB.

If a landscape requires constant human "interference"—GPS collars, strategic fires, and the manual removal of plantations—to survive, is it still "nature"? Perhaps the answer lies in the result. Without these interventions, the rare species that call the heath home would face local extinction. In the modern world, "wild" is not a place where humans are absent; it is a place where humans act as a vital, science-led part of the ecological balance.