Ponies, grazing and the Dartmoor Commons

Dartmoor Nature Alliance (DNA) recognises the cultural importance of the Dartmoor Hill Ponies, alongside the growing scientific evidence supporting the value of their grazing patterns, including the work undertaken by Plymouth University. 

We also strongly recognise the importance of multi-species grazing systems more broadly. Different animals graze in different ways, and those varied grazing patterns can all play an important role depending on the ecological outcomes being sought in a particular landscape.

For that reason, we do not see habitat restoration and pony conservation as opposing goals. In many cases they should be complementary.

Given the wider concerns about grazing levels across the commons, DNA completely supports Natural England’s position that ponies should be included within stocking calculations. These, after all, are grazing animals in the same way as cattle and sheep, and therefore have the potential to shape the vegetation, for better or worse. We welcome Defra minister Angela Eagle's clarity on this in the Commons this week [2 June]:

as with all livestock, they are included in stocking density calculations as they contribute to overall grazing pressure.

Importantly, including them as grazing animals also means ponies can now be properly recognised within agri-environment payment schemes, helping ensure they are valued equally alongside cattle and sheep. 

The Environmental Land Management Scheme now includes three specific options supporting pony grazing on moorland:

CUP15: Keep cattle and ponies on moorland supplement (minimum 30% GLU) — £7 per hectare

CUP16: Keep cattle and ponies on moorland supplement (minimum 70% GLU) — £18 per hectare

CUP17: Keep cattle and ponies on moorland supplement (100% GLU) — £23 per hectare

We see this as a genuine opportunity for ponies and cattle to be equally supported within future land management, while still allowing individual farmers and commoners to decide what stock they wish to keep.

Transparency on Management of Ponies

DNA also believe there needs to be greater transparency and consistency around the management of all ponies grazing on the open moor. Visible identification, publicly available stock records, and proper management of unclaimed or unmarked animals are all important parts of ensuring both animal welfare and public confidence in the future of commoning.

It’s time to bring back Dartmoor’s lost rainforests

Piles Copse (image: Guy Shrubsole)

Campaigner, author and Dartmoor Nature Alliance core group member Guy Shrubsole describes why it's now time to bring back Dartmoor's lost Rainforests.

Raindrops bead along a gnarled branch of oak, covered in verdant moss that’s as thick as deep-pile carpet. A downpour has drenched you to the skin, but you’re too enthralled to care: the tree in front of you is draped with grey-green lichens, more lustrous than Gandalf’s beard. A crack in the gunmetal clouds causes sunlight to flash through the acid-green ferns that grow on the tree, illuminating them like a stained-glass window.

It’s a scene familiar to anyone who’s explored one of Dartmoor’s glorious temperate rainforests. But perhaps we don’t always realise how rare and special these places are. Temperate rainforest is an ecosystem that covers less than 1% of the planet’s surface, twinning Dartmoor with far-flung places like the Pacific north-west coast of America and the fern-filled valleys of New Zealand. 

Temperate rainforest is also far rarer than it should be – because we humans have destroyed so much of it. On the central Dartmoor commons, just three rainforest fragments remain: the upland oakwoods of Wistman’s Wood, Black Tor Copse and Piles Copse. These tiny islands of wildlife, each a handful of acres in size, lie marooned amidst a sea of purple moor grass. The rest of the high moor remains largely treeless today. 

Yet it wasn’t always like this. Lurking in the landscape are clues to Dartmoor’s lost woods: mysterious placenames that point to a time when more trees grew here, like Birch Tor, or the Watern Oak. William Crossing’s definitive Guide to Dartmoor records “a spot known to the moormen as Fur Tor Wood”, which once clung to the boulder-strewn slopes of this most remote of tors. Or delve deeper, and speak to the scientists who’ve extracted peat cores from Dartmoor’s bogs. The ancient pollen they’ve found paints a very different picture of Dartmoor pre-human settlement: a mosaic landscape of scattered trees and groves, scrub and open areas. 

But centuries of human impact have taken their toll on Dartmoor’s rainforests. We know from old records that Black Tor Copse, for example, used to be larger – stretching along the West Okement into the Forest of Dartmoor – before some of it was cut down for firewood. In more recent decades, overgrazing by historically unprecedented numbers of sheep has prevented sapling regeneration. Visit the copse and you’ll find oaks on its upper edges that have been nibbled by sheep to less than a foot high. Stranded far from their nearest neighbours, our rainforest fragments are vulnerable to outbreaks of disease and the escalating climate crisis. They need to be allowed to spread.

The good news is that in the past few years, there’s been a groundswell of activity to begin restoring Dartmoor’s rainforests. In 2023, the Duchy of Cornwall – Prince William’s estate and the biggest landowner on Dartmoor – announced they would seek to double the area of Wistman’s Wood in a generation. Working with their tenant farmer, alongside Natural England and charities like Moor Trees and the Woodland Trust, the Duchy has overseen a change in how the land is managed. Sheep no longer graze there, replaced by a herd of cattle fitted with GPS collars to control their movements; young saplings are protected with wire ‘cactus guards’; and natural regeneration is encouraged by a set of fenced ‘exclosures’, where grazing livestock are excluded. Even more encouraging are the plans of the Central Dartmoor Landscape Recovery (CDLR) project, spearheaded by the Duchy’s tenant farmers, who are bidding for government funding to restore habitats across the moor – including temperate rainforest. A ‘Dartmoor Landscape Vision’, unveiled by the Duchy and CDLR last summer after much consultation with local residents, featured proposals to “improve and connect existing temperate woodland & rainforest”.

Wistman's Wood (image: Guy Shrubsole)

But these moves, whilst very exciting, must only be the start. That’s why the Dartmoor Nature Alliance – a group of people who live locally and are concerned by nature’s plight on the moor – has launched a new campaign to bring back Dartmoor’s rainforests. Restoring rainforest on enclosed land, like the Duchy’s ‘newtake’ tenancies, is relatively straightforward if farmers are supportive and funding is put in place. What’s more challenging is getting more trees to grow on Dartmoor’s commons, which cover the entirety of the high moor. The ‘Forest of Dartmoor’ – so-named because it used to be a royal hunting forest – is, ironically, almost entirely treeless.

The issue here isn’t a lack of suitable topography or soils. No-one is seriously suggesting that the deep peat bogs that dominate central Dartmoor could support dense woodland. But Dartmoor’s commons are also threaded through with steep-sided river valleys, peppered with boulder fields, and bordered by mineral soils covered today in bracken, all of which would have historically supported more patches of rainforest. What prevents these places naturally regenerating is the difficulty of getting agreement to reduce grazing on commons. This is why Black Tor Copse, for instance, is being overgrazed – its upper edge abuts Okehampton Common.

We would like to see the Duchy work with the Okehampton commoners to urgently restore Black Tor Copse – following the hugely positive example set at Wistman’s Wood. What’s needed is a large exclosure fence around the north-east side of the copse to protect it from grazing pressure, and allow fresh saplings to grow: a solution backed by Natural England.

More broadly, Dartmoor Nature Alliance is calling for a doubling of rainforest on Dartmoor’s commons. This might sound dramatic, but it is not: an increase from around 1,800 acres of wooded commons currently to 3,700 acres in future. Commoners should rightly be paid for restoring rainforest, whilst feeling reassured that the areas in question would be land least suitable for grazing anyway. What’s more, trees provide shelter for livestock during increasingly wet winters and hot summers. Most of all, we hope that Dartmoor’s landowners, farmers and conservationists can unite to support the restoration of a truly magical habitat. It’s time to bring back Dartmoor’s lost rainforests.

Why winter sheep grazing on Dartmoor’s commons must end

View towards Kes Tor from the Longstone

In Dartmoor Nature Alliance’s 2025 “Call to Action” the campaign group stated clearly that all sheep grazing should be removed in winter from the Dartmoor commons, and the land be allowed to rest. With new agri-environment schemes on the horizon, and the commons at a turning point, DNA’s Tony Whitehead argues that now is the time to make that bold decision …

For over a decade now, Higher Level Stewardship agreements have been in place across the Dartmoor Commons. Before that were Environmentally Sensitive Area agreements going back to the late 90s. In one form or another, the commons have been in agri-environment schemes for more than a quarter of a century.

These agreements are between Commons Associations and the Rural Payments Agency and are advised and monitored by Natural England, the Government’s independent scientific adviser on nature. Their purpose has been to provide public money to Dartmoor’s commoners to ensure that the commons are restored to a favourable ecological condition. 

On the Dartmoor commons, favourable condition means restoring and maintaining a rich mix of habitats, including bogs, heaths and Atlantic rainforest that are of international importance for their wildlife. This restoration is not only for wildlife, it also plays a vital role in protecting Dartmoor’s peat. Intact peat stores large amounts of carbon; when it is damaged or degraded, that carbon is released into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. Proper habitat management, therefore, benefits both wildlife and the wider climate.

However, despite c£3.2M annually being given to commoners, the condition of Dartmoor’s commons has not improved.  Indeed, in many key habitats it has declined. On Willings Walls and Hentor Warrens Common, for instance, heather cover in recent years has declined from 25% to just 1%. As Dartmoor Nature Alliance has detailed in our recent Call to Action, Dartmoor’s habitats are unacceptably degraded and in urgent need of restoration.

One key issue is grazing pressure. For both the North Dartmoor and South Dartmoor Sites of Special Scientific Interest, overgrazing is listed as a high-risk site pressure. The situation is well described by NE’s Regional Director for the South West, Dave Slater:

“... too much grazing at the wrong time of year can lead to a domination of grasses and the loss of the structure that is needed for wildlife to flourish. During the winter when grass availability is reduced sheep will browse the new growth of heather and bilberry. This grazing pressure will, over time, lead to a sharp decline in heather cover. The impact of sheep on heathland vegetation is further compounded by the over dominance of purple moor-grass (Molinia) from a lack of summer grazing by cattle and historic drainage. As purple moor-grass is unpalatable during the winter this results in the sheep grazing being concentrated on the drier heathland habitats further compounding the damaging impact of winter sheep grazing.”

Winter grazing and Dartmoor’s commons

The damaging impact of winter grazing has long been understood on Dartmoor. Cattle are an issue, but as per the quote above, sheep are a particular problem because they repeatedly target heather and bilberry, preventing regeneration and gradually converting heath into species-poor grassland. In small experimental “exclosures”, such as at West Mill Tor, where animals were entirely excluded, the heather and bilberry regenerated quite rapidly.

In 2020 NE tried to take action to bring overgrazing under control on Okehampton Common where the ten-year HLS agreement was coming to an end (having delivered nothing), and an extension was being sought by the Commoners’ Association. The local NE team were very clear: 

“Our advice is that the current level of winter sheep grazing is having a significant impact on the heathland vegetation in particular and we have advised that this issue needs to be addressed if the SSSI condition is to be restored."

This sparked outrage and farmers ran to the press, sparking lurid headlines - “Natural England threatens to sacrifice Dartmoor’s Farmers.” 

Image: Moorlander Headline 2 October 2020

Undaunted, three years later, NE tried to take action to bring winter sheep grazing under control in the rest of Dartmoor’s expiring and failing HLS agreements. In March 2023 letters were sent to Commoners’ Associations that laid out a number of principles that would underpin NE’s approach to supporting extensions to HLS agreements “so that all parties can be confident the agreement outcomes will be delivered.”

The third listed principle read: 

“Except for pony herds, winter grazing will need to be justified through clear and specific environmental outcomes that require winter stocking. If there is a case made for winter grazing then this will only supported where it has been established that there will not be detrimental impacts on key habitats (such as heath, blanket bog, mire) or species.”

Each letter was accompanied by a table detailing the ideal stocking rates to be achieved over a five-year trajectory. These rates boldly detailed the winter cuts in sheep stocking levels necessary to restore the heaths. Cue more outrage. 

"A Dartmoor farmer and commoners’ council leader has warned that a proposal by Government body Natural England to take 90 per cent of their livestock off Dartmoor to protect wildlife could kill upland farming. Dartmoor Commoners’ Council vice chairman Layland Branfield said he and other upland farmers in the heart of Dartmoor were facing removing 90 per cent of their stock over the winter"

- Tavistock Times, 16 April 2023

Accusations of ideologically driven rewilders in NE were made,  MPs were contacted, a debate was held in Parliament led by Sir Geoffrey Cox MP, the Fursdon Review was ordered, and the Dartmoor Land Use Management Group was set up to deliver on the Fursdon recommendations in what some saw as a huge “can-kicking” exercise. 

The Hobbled Regulator

To cut a long story short, NE backed down on winter grazing. Local farming commentators were content that NE had been “reined in” and there would be no repetition of the  “sorry rewilding wet dreams we were hearing”.  Job done, everything back to normal and, crucially, HLS agreements were extended, and millions of pounds continued to flow into commoners' pockets without any need for significant change to schemes that had clearly failed. 

The Habitats Regulations Assessments (HRAs) necessary for agreement approvals made this very clear. We obtained all the Dartmoor Commons HRAs under an EIR request, along with all the management/work plans. These can be searched and read here. In 2023, for instance, NE officers concluded that it could not be ascertained that the Penn and Stall Moor HLS agreement extension would not have an adverse impact due to high autumn/winter grazing pressure (p20 here).  The issue was escalated to NE director level who concluded that because it was only a short time and the intention was “to establish a trajectory towards favourable condition” consent could be given. 

Document obtained in October 2025 from EIR Request 2025/08668

By 2025, post-Fursdon Review and the “reining in” of Natural England, any pretence of caution had been dropped, and extensions were being given the green light through the HRAs. At the inaugural meeting of the new Dartmoor Land Use Management Group in January 2025, a local Natural England Officer said that NE would “very shortly be communicating with HLS agreement holders, offering two-year extensions to current agreements subject to some potential ‘tweaks’ to management plans".

NE produced a new set of principles for Dartmoor and, instead of insisting on reductions in return for taxpayer cash, now asked, under “targeted grazing”, for “voluntary reductions in winter sheep numbers (albeit small)” (my emphasis).  These principles can be read here on p63/4 of the Forest of Dartmoor HLS extension HRA - an agreement that alone is worth £1.37M/pa - and in all the other 2025 HRAs. 

Elsewhere in the HRAs NE do ask that where sheep in the winter were “judged to be impacting negatively on the condition of areas of wet and dry heath”  agreement holders should “either ensure active shepherding is effective or reduce/remove stock”. But this is a far cry from solidly building reductions into agreements as had been tried in 2020 and 2023.

To be fair, NE found themselves in a difficult situation locally. The “reining in” included a rebuilding of relationships with commoners. It also recognised that many hill farmers depended entirely on payments from agri-environment schemes. The NE Regional director, Dave Slater, wrote in April 2025, “Viable farming businesses are key to sustainable management”. Farm businesses are indeed key to sustainable management, but their “viability” on the uplands of Dartmoor is wholly dependent on the taxpayer. Politically, “tweaks” were as far as the local team felt this could be pushed.  

Crucially, though, as stated in an NE blog in April 2025, this was seen as an interim approach by NE. And that interim period is now coming to an end. 

Now is the crucial time

Dartmoor’s commons are at a turning point. The old HLS schemes will no longer be available from 2028, and the Basic Payment Scheme is almost gone.  If the commoners want to continue receiving public money, the only way this will be forthcoming is via the new Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier Scheme (CSHT) or, in some places, the Landscape Recovery Scheme (LRS). Signing up to either of these schemes will involve changing farming practices to restore the commons. 

It's worth remembering that these are voluntary schemes.  The Commoners Associations do not need to sign up to any scheme. Of course, this would mean a huge loss of public cash, but that is a choice. Of course, even without schemes, farming operations on the SSSIs still need NE consent if any commoner considers flooding the commons with stock to the maximum of his or her grazing rights.  

If the choice is made to enter a scheme, CSHT and LRS are 10 and 20-year agreements, respectively. This means that NE - and we, the taxpayers - cannot continue an interim approach anymore, and “tweaks” to see agreements through are surely no longer tolerable.  Dartmoor’s nature needs change, and it needs it now.

Central to the recovery of the internationally important heaths on the commons, and it cannot be put more bluntly than this, is now the total removal in winter of all sheep from Dartmoor’s commons.

This is said because it follows the evidence. Natural England needs to show confidence now in making decisions based on evidence, and largely their own evidence, particularly as presented here, here and here.  

Winter removal is factored into the schemes themselves. In CSHT all three “upland livestock grazing on moorland” offers include encouragement for this in return at the highest level (Option UPL3) for £66/ha per year. On the 11,170ha Forest of Dartmoor Common, this translates to a cool £7.4M over ten years. The issue here is, how will the Commons Associations deal with an option such as UPL3, which demands an overall stocking rate of 0.04 livestock units per ha and suggests removing winter stock? Will they accept it because it pays the most?  Or will they try to lobby for changes to the stocking rates and allowance of winter grazing so that they can “have their cake and eat it”? 

Likewise, the twenty-year Landscape Recovery scheme, although far from agreed, would offer similar encouragements (or disincentives depending on how you look at it!).

Stopping further damage to Dartmoor’s commons: doing the job properly

Whatever the Commons Associations do, it is clear that NE must no longer accept, or sign off on any Habitats Regulations Assessments for commons agri-environment agreements that do not include winter sheep removal. Our legally protected nature sites need protection. Any assessment by NE, the Government’s enforcer of wildlife law, that falls short of this would surely be open to immediate legal challenge. 

Likewise, landowners of the Dartmoor commons should not sign agreements that do not include winter sheep removal. They have a veto and should use it, and that includes Dartmoor’s biggest landowner, the Duchy of Cornwall. They have legal responsibility for the protected sites they own and should not sign agreements that do not guarantee nature’s recovery. This should not be too difficult a step for the Duchy. In their 2025 vision for Dartmoor, they state clearly, “If heathlands are declining in condition or extent, winter grazing should be limited or halted” (my emphasis, p. 106 here).

Of course, none of this is to underestimate the challenges that this will bring to the commoners themselves.  For a couple of generations, since the widespread use of hardy black-faced sheep post-war, commoners have been used to outwintering flocks on the moors, while keeping other flocks on the home farm. Gone are the days of traditional “levancy and couchancy” where the size of your flock on the common was determined by the space you had to overwinter it on the home farm.  Now, there’s no room for those winter moorland sheep because the home farm is full of … more sheep. 

So the systems that have evolved beyond environmental limits (in part as a result of historical Government policy) need to change, and that’s going to be tough. But then, the rewards are there through the payments in the agreements. And yes, there are all sorts of other issues - animals that are taken off then put back on the moor will need protection from tick-borne diseases, and the loss of immunity that builds up if they are always out on the open land. Here, vaccine development could be the answer. But these are answers that the farming community must positively and actively bring; those with the skills and expertise to manage animals - and the genuine ambition to deliver for nature alongside making a living from farming. 

Working together, nature conservationists, the Dartmoor community and commoners, we could see nature on Dartmoor restored over the next twenty years. More heath, more rainforest in the valleys, all below a mantle of healthy blanket bog. 

But we have to be bold and make the right decisions now. If we do not, nature is doomed to suffer the failures of previous decades, as well as to continue wasting public money. We really can’t afford that. If nature loses, we all lose. 

Many thanks to the DNA Core Group for their support and comments on this article.