A full version of this article appears in the magazine.

 

The woman picks her way carefully down through the heather, child holding onto her long black dress; cloud-capped mountain behind her. She carries under her arm a sack full of charred heather and gorse stalks. It is 1906 and the woman is Elin Baum, my great grandmother; the child: Sarah Ann, my grandmother. After the bread is baked, when the oven is a little cooler, they will bake cacan llys, made with bilberries, gathered from that same hillside above the village.

 

The history of the heaths of Llŷn is one of exploitation and destruction. In the middle ages, vast tracts of the peninsula were unenclosed pasture: the soil too wet or too shallow to yield to the ox-drawn plough. These were the commons of Llŷn. Originally under the ownership of the princes of Gwynedd, they had always been a vital part of the way of life in Llŷn. For centuries, they were the defining feature of the landscape.

 

Yet, even then, much of the peninsula was highly productive farmland and had been since pre-history; but you were never far from the common. Like Hardy’s Egdon Heath, it was the ubiquitous brooding presence. It inspired our folklore and, with the churring of its nightjars and the piping of its curlews, provided the inescapable background to human life.

 

The heath was always a battleground in the struggle between people and nature. And for a brief period in the 1810s, one of those heaths became literally a battleground. The heath was Rhos Hirwaen, now surviving in name only.

 

From time immemorial, the poor had depended on access to this common to such an extent that they not only grazed their animals on it, but they also built their homes on it, simple mud and thatch tyddynnod. When they were not fishing, they laboured to create earth-banked enclosures amongst the gorse and bracken and grew a few vegetables in the poor soil. It should not be a surprise therefore to learn that when the landlord decided to enclose the common and evict them from the land they had considered theirs, they rebelled. Little is known of the stand-off that ensued, but the fact that the militia was sent in to quell the confrontation speaks volumes of the commoners’ defiance.

 

This dimly-remembered episode gives a human face to the fact that between 1810 and 1820, roughly 10,000 acres of common in the south-western part of the peninsula – including Rhos Hirwaen – were cleared, enclosed, drained and put to the modern iron plough. New farms were created with more progressive tenants in a process that has been called ‘internal colonisation’. But even today, some of the former ‘encroachments’, with their mud-walled tyddynnod now slated and rendered, can be found as islands marooned in a sea of ordinary farmland.

 

As I look out over what was once an intricate patchwork of field and heath, born of the labour of generations of tyddynnwyr, I try to persuade myself that what looks like dereliction is in fact nature reclaiming what was once hers. But the echoes of a lost community return to trouble me. In these times of global warming and overcrowding, it is easy to think that mankind’s relationship with nature is always negative. But there are places where the tension between people and their environment has created landscapes of extraordinary beauty and, yes, flourishing, diverse wildlife habitats; and this was indeed one of those places.

 

I thought about the future for all the other heaths of the peninsula. How can biodiversity strategies and conservation plans embrace this human element in a world where people’s expectations of life have changed so much? Is there any point in preserving a habitat, when the way of life that created it is gone?

 

Defeated, I shake my head, and smile when I consider what Elin Baum would have made of such questions. As I turn to make my way back up the lane to the car, all I can really be sure about is that these places were an important part of their lives, and we should never forget that their lives were an important part of these places.

 

A century has passed since my grandmother gathered poethwal on Yr Eifl. I’m in a meeting of the Cadw’r Lliw yn Llŷn initiative, discussing a strategy for the conservation of the few surviving heaths of Llŷn.

 

Despite hearing about the multitude of pressures that continue to threaten the remnant heaths of the peninsula, the tone of the meeting is optimistic. We hear that an impressive amount of work has already been done. This includes restoring traditional boundaries, improving public access and implementing habitat monitoring programmes.

 

We go on to discuss strengthening the partnership and preparing a strategy that could attract funding to secure the long-term future for these treasured places. As the meeting progresses, I realise that the greatest challenge that face us is not how to recover the heath in areas where it has been lost; we know that this can be done, with the appropriate financial and technical support. Neither is it the challenge of how to overcome the extreme isolation that now threatens most of our heathland species; banks, hedges, conservation headlands, ponds and new wetlands and can be created as habitat pathways and ‘stepping stones’ with the help of neighbouring landowners.

 

No, the greatest challenge that we face is how to ensure that the burgeoning heaths of tomorrow once again have strong bonds with their communities – and not only with a few larger farmers and weekend leisure seekers – but also a new generation of artisans and smallholders. It is only then that we can feel that our common heathland inheritance is truly alive.

 

Richard Neale is the National Trust’s Property Manager for West Snowdonia & Llŷn.