Gile Roberts, an Exmoor Society member whose family have lived outside Dulverton for many years, joined our Meadows Day celebrations this year and was inspired to write this essay for us.
In July, The Exmoor Society celebrated Meadows Day with a lecture by the ecologist and wildlife illustrator John Walters in Dulverton, followed the next day, at White Rocks Cottage, Simonsbath, with talks by volunteers and farmers involved in meadow restoration and a guided walk around the meadows of Exmoor Forest Estate, led by the manager Mark de Wynter-Smith. Hearing about the ecology of meadows was fascinating, as was learning how meadow restoration can work in farming neither as just a luxury for a few enthusiasts, nor as a catch-all solution to some of the problems of modern farming, but rather as something that can be integrated into farming practice, bringing real benefits while avoiding financial loss.
I decided to talk to people on Exmoor involved in meadow restoration to get a better understanding of the issues involved, and Kate O’Sullivan, Chair of The Society, put me in touch with working farmers, land owners, an ecologist involved in meadow restoration and staff at the National Park.
Meadows in Exmoor’s past
The names of wild meadow plants found in the acid soil of Exmoor farms are evocative: Smooth Hawksbeard, Yarrow, Lesser Stitchwort, Cat’s Ear, Black Knapweed, Creeping Buttercup. Meadows are human creations and came to Exmoor with the first farming here around 6,000 years ago, yet these plants have their origins in a past older than agriculture. They evolved to colonise the clearings that occurred when a tree fell in the forests that covered Britain after the last ice age ended, or in clearings created by the grazing and wallowing of the herds of aurochs – the wild cattle that roamed the forests (the huge skull of an aurochs found at Porlock can be seen in the Dovery museum there).
As Neolithic farmers moved up the Exmoor valleys, trees were cleared for fields, and the temporary clearings in the old forests were replaced by more permanent opportunities for these plants. That process expanded over the centuries, and the meadows spread up from the valley bottoms to the slopes.
Before the Second World War, meadows were cut in late summer – late August or early September. The cut plants were left to dry, seeds from them fell to the ground to renew the soil seed bank, and the hay was collected and used to feed livestock over the winter. This timing was good for biodiversity: it allowed plants to reseed and the insects, birds and mammals that thrive in this environment to breed before the cut. That changed radically after the war with the development of silage techniques, and since the 1950s, meadows have generally been cut much earlier and often cut multiple times to maximise production. Native plants were replaced by grasses such as rye grass, which give predictable high yields but harbour minimal biodiversity. Fertilisers, along with pesticides and herbicides, were used to boost productivity, water meadows were drained and land ploughed. 97% of Britain’s wildflower meadows were lost.
The Biodiversity of Exmoor Meadows
It is late July 2025, and Jemima Edgar – ‘Minnie’ – is showing me one of her meadow fields on Higher Blacklands Farm near Withypool. They are a glorious sight – the hay cut will be soon, but for now, the wildflowers and grasses occupy several acres in this and adjoining fields. Grasshoppers jump at our feet, and blue butterflies float over the flowers. Her farm has mostly cattle and some sheep on 250 acres of grassland, but these fields have not been grazed since March. When you crouch down and observe closely, a myriad of insects are present in the vegetation. This family farm has been organic for 15 years. Minnie wants biodiversity on her land, but she operates under financial constraints – ‘I want to do my best for the environment,’ she says, ‘But there’s lots of paperwork and the fixed costs of farming – such as repairing buildings – keep going up.’
Minnie applied to FWAG – the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group – for advice on applying for grants. As part of the application, Dulverton-based ecologist David Boyce helped with vegetation and insect surveys. ‘It can be difficult on Exmoor to get over the threshold of 14/15 target species that is required for grants, but the fact that here we have acid soils with less diversity needs to be taken into account,’ Minnie says. Yet to my untrained eye, it seems highly diverse. Minnie cites Eyebright, Yellow Rattle, Smooth Hawkbit and Rough Hawkbit, Catsear, Stichwort, Tormentil and Red Clover. In her meadows, different species predominate in different places. A field she showed me, which has more acidic soil and steeper slopes with less nutrients, has a somewhat different plant profile to another. In some places, Yellow rattle, a flower which parasitises other plants by tapping into their roots and extracting nutrients and which plays a central role in limiting grasses in meadows, is very present. In others, it has given way to Hawkbit – all part of a dynamic ongoing process.
Although Exmoor’s acid soil means that the biodiversity of meadows here does not match that of meadows on lowland alkaline chalk soil, Exmoor does have a couple of advantages in terms of biodiversity – the steep slopes and farming conditions here mean that previously there was often a lack of investment, and many meadows here survived intact. Annie Prebensen of the Hollam estate above Dulverton says, ‘The same family lived here for 350 years, and in the 20th Century, they basically ran out of money, so they didn’t really do anything with the land. In that respect, we are lucky – unlike so many farms, much of our land hasn’t really been messed with. Also, the valley on part of our land is so steep that it could never be cultivated, so we have many waxcap fungi, lousewort and two varieties of Bird’s-foot trefoil.’
On the matter of meadow diversity and funding Lucy Cornwall of the National Park explains, ‘Ideally you should have 15 plant species per square metre, but you can get around it by having good indicator species. On some of Exmoor’s acid ground, you can get good indicator species such as Pignut and Devil’s -bit scabious.’
Making Meadows Work on Exmoor
Meadows need to be cut to provide hay for livestock over the winter. David Boyce says ‘Where there is cutting for hay, it tends to get done early. For biodiversity, cutting should be done from mid-July onwards, ideally as late as possible. In fact, the best are lightly grazed pastures, which are more natural systems without the hay cut.’
If late hay cuts or even lightly grazed pasture with no cut at all are the best for biodiversity, how to reconcile that with the farmer’s need to turn a profit and the country’s need to produce food?
The upland conditions on Exmoor mean that it cannot be an area of high intensity arable production, but livestock farmers here still have a choice between a high input approach with fertilisers and herbicides to encourage the strong growth of commercial grass for intensive grazing, or a lower input approach with less investment, or with none at all, in such artificial means of boosting production.
Holly Purdey, tenant farmer at Horner Farm, spoke at the Simonbath meeting about the financial side of encouraging wildflower meadows on farmland. She said that while her wildflower meadows support less livestock than a high-input approach, they reduced her expenditure. At Blacklands Farm Minnie says that an earlier hay cut on her meadows would provide better quality forage, but that her cattle still greatly appreciate the late cut hay, and it seems to make them healthy and disease resistant. However, extra finance through the government’s Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme is important. Hollam is a working estate, but the emphasis is on conservation with about 100 acres farmed as wild flower meadows where grazing is done up to April, after which the meadows are left to grow until they are cut in late July or early August and then grazed again in the winter. No fertilisers or sprays are used, but lime is periodically added to reduce acidity.
For those wanting to maintain, expand or create meadows, the National Park offers practical advice and can point landowners in the right direction for applying for grants. They have worked with over 80 landowners. Lucy Cornwall says ‘We can help landowners achieve eligibility for schemes and payments for meadows have increased in recent years. New SFIs and Stewardship schemes have been put in place in the last three years. People don’t always appreciate that the rest period for wildflower meadows is so long – that is why payments have grown because the hay cut is less rich and grazing availability is reduced.’
Heather Harley, also of the National Park, adds ‘If someone says that they can’t afford the wildflowers on productive ground, then we suggest other options such as converting margins of fields. Meadows can be done on a smaller scale without taking much land meant for summer grazing. A personal approach with landowners is key – meeting face to face. What works for one farmer may not work for another. What works for one field may not work for another.’
Lucy and Heather are on the ‘Sowing the Seeds’ project team. This is an Exmoor based meadow restoration project, funded through private donations with additional finance through the government’s Farming in Protected Landscapes. The scheme has been able to purchase key mechanical equipment such as a seed collector. They collect seeds from wildflower meadow donor sites on Exmoor, dry them at their depot and make them available to those who want to create wildflower meadows on their land along with providing the expertise on how to go about it.
Of course, the easiest way of encouraging meadows is to preserve and maintain those that are already there. For land that used to be wildflower meadow but has since been converted to intensive high-input farming, the process is more complex, but ‘Sowing the Seeds’ can help with techniques to reduce the agricultural grasses and replace them with biodiverse wildflowers and wild grasses provided by their seed bank. Land that has not received significant fertiliser over the years will be easier to convert than land that has. Heavily fertilised land may need to have topsoil scraped out as phosphates tend to bind into the soil and while they are still present commercial grasses will outcompete wildflowers. Scraping has been done on the margins of some fields at Hollam, with topsoil put on the hedge banks and the bare ground sown with wildflower seed mix. David Boyce, who worked on this project says ‘to start with Oxeye daises dominate as they like disturbed conditions but then you get a succession of plants. Yellow Rattle plays a key role in limiting grasses.’
Not all the landowners involved have been farmers – meadows can be created on smaller plots of land and several of the people that Lucy and Heather have helped have created smaller scale meadows in their gardens.
Jo and Stephen Daughtey at the Old School House in Dulverton have converted about one acre on a steep slope of their garden to a wildflower meadow. Following the advice of Lucy and Heather they mowed the lawn grass that was there before as short as they could manage and then scraped until there was as much bare earth as possible. In October they scattered seeds provided by Sowing the Seeds. Now, a couple of years later, the meadow is thriving with Wild Oatgrass, Knapweed, Yarrow, Sweet Vernal Grass and Yorkshire Fog Grass predominant. Not being obliged to use the hay to feed stock, Jo and Stephen can cut their meadow in September or October. When I visited them in late July I was struck by how many butterflies were active over this one relatively small patch.
The Future of Meadows on Exmoor
The expanding Sowing the Seeds project on Exmoor and the enthusiasm of meadow makers such as Minnie, Annie, Holly, Jo and Stephen bodes well for the future of meadows here. However, government policies and funding models may change, and the warming climate is already bringing its own challenges – species favouring cooler wetter conditions may be replaced by species favouring warmer drier conditions (to give one Exmoor example, David Boyce cites the recent disappearance of the Mountain Bumblebee from moors such as Molland and its reduction to one final patch on Dunkery Beacon).
But meadows are resilient. Their very nature means that the plants found in them are hardy and they will thrive given half a chance. This summer I met people who care and who want to give meadows on Exmoor that chance and I have seen in their fields and gardens the biodiverse and beautiful results.
Giles Roberts
