Why winter sheep grazing on Dartmoor’s commons must end
- Tony Whitehead
- 38 minutes ago
- 9 min read
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.”
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.
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.