The sheep-farming fight tarnishing the Lake District fells

Butterflies flutter over a verdant Lake District meadow, and tiny fish make their way over the gravel of the crystal-clear Swindale Beck as it meanders through the valley.
Somewhere on the hillside scrub a cuckoo calls. Above, a peregrine and buzzard circle the bluest of skies, diving towards the bright yellow common gorse below us, the gentle breeze wafting its distinctive coconut scent.
As the path through this remarkable, award-winning valley opens up – it's one of three that make up the 12 square miles of farmland, moorland, rivers, rainforest and wildflower meadows that is Wild Haweswater – two walkers stop and gasp at the beauty of it all.
If there were a classic springtime scene in the Lake District it would surely be this… that is, if there weren't one thing missing. It's lambing season – yet there are no iconic Lake District sheep to be seen.
And that's because, on this land tenanted by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) from landowners United Utilities (Haweswater being a reservoir supplying two million people in the North West with drinking water), the thousands of sheep that have traditionally been tasked with grazing have gradually been destocked – to the point where, a few weeks ago, some of the last were sold by the RSPB at auction.
Farmers have been keeping sheep on the upland fells for centuries, although in truly significant numbers only since the Second World War, when food production was ramped up. Particularly since the foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2001, landowners – sometimes via their tenants – have destocked, changing land management policies in line with the direction of government subsidies towards agri-environment schemes.
In the RSPB's case, it believed that the environmental aims it had for the landscape of the two farms that had sheep on them – Naddle and Swindale – would be better served by replacing the grazing areas with cattle and ponies, replanting trees and native plants and even restoring the river running through the valley back to its natural route.
And for all that the RSPB and United Utilities have the right to do this given it is their land, some local sheep farmers believe that these environmental schemes and policies are the final nail in the coffin for a traditional industry that is on its knees. Residents reckon this beautiful part of the eastern Lakes has lost half its farms in the past 10 years.
'[The RSPB sold the sheep] for what? So they can do some more rewilding? What a load of rubbish,' says Katy Cropper, a local farmer and sheepdog trainer who used to help the farmers at Swindale gather their sheep.
'See over there?' she asks, pointing across the valley. 'The fell looks to me like an overgrown mess. It used to be beautiful, [grazed by sheep which were] maintained by farmers for generations. Now it's just a tinderbox of long brown grass waiting to go up in flames.
'All this money is being spent on a waste of time; millions of pounds spent on trees which I can't see growing successfully. And we can't eat trees, can we? What's happened here has spoilt the community, ruined people's livelihoods. What are the families who have grown up shepherding these lands going to do now?'
The stats bear it out: Defra's report last year had the UK's sheep population at a record low, while the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board industry body recently published a report showing sheep meat imports were up 59 per cent on 2023 for the first two months of 2025.
While the research shows the UK is self-sufficient in sheep meat, as the National Sheep Association points out, self-sufficiency is not the same as food or industry security – both of which are vulnerable if governments and agencies prioritise imports and environmental schemes over domestic production.
It feels like Wild Haweswater, then, is at the heart of a battle for the true soul, the very character of the Lake District. Indeed, the Unesco description of the Lake District National Park when it was awarded World Heritage status makes explicit reference to the symbiotic relationship between farming and the environment in this part of the world: 'A landscape of exceptional beauty, shaped by persistent and distinctive agro-pastural traditions and local industry which give it special character.'
Yet the general consensus among the conservation community and environmental stakeholders is that if you want to maintain and develop the exceptional beauty of a landscape, sheep are probably not the best option: they believe they tend to degrade or destroy the natural, native plant life by constantly nibbling away at the trees, shrubs and flowering plants attempting to come through; heavier-footed animals, they say, trample the bracken instead and spread wildflower seed through their dung.
Back at Naddle Farm – one of two farms here that the RSPB maintains – they're careful not to call what they do rewilding. 'It's a landscape restoration partnership with United Utilities,' says Annabel Rushton, the RSPB's people and partnerships manager.
Hers may sound like a desk job, but she can't wait to get out into that landscape and show me an alder that now has rowan growing out of it. 'A classic indicator of a temperate rainforest,' she says. 'It's the second-largest area of this type of rainforest in the Lake District; a very special place.
'And then in the hay meadow, we'll have great burnet, wood cranesbill, melancholy thistle – it's like a wash of colour which then brings in all the insect life: golden-ringed dragonflies, dark green fritillaries, chimney sweeper moths. And our work to restore this habitat, bring it back from a pretty degraded state, is just getting better each year.'
What frustrates the RSPB in this debate the most, though, is the narrative that it's somehow pushed out the sheep farmers of this area in favour of wildflowers. It's its own farming team which manages the livestock and habitat, and ultimately the RSPB didn't believe it could meet its aims for conservation on its land while running a flock of sheep.
'Look over there,' says Rushton, pointing beyond a particularly magnificent area of bright yellow gorse. 'You can still see sheep in this landscape on the common land, it's just that our objectives for our land are different.'
As we wind our way through Swindale, Glen Swainson, Wild Haweswater's senior site manager, says the RSPB doesn't want to remove animals entirely but create a wood pasture, 'a really lovely balance between agriculture and nature conservation.
'It is still a farmed landscape that needs managing,' he admits when we come to a pasture with hill ponies happily grazing. 'We've had sheep, we've got cattle, and we've got these ponies, but the sheep element always has more of a struggle to it in terms of making it pay as well.That's upland sheep farming as a whole; everyone will tell you the economics of it are really difficult.'He has a point. Post-Brexit, the EU Common Agricultural Policy – which gave area-based direct payment subsidies to farmers – came to an end. These direct payments made up more than 80 per cent of government support for farmers and last year's 'Future of Sheep Farming' debate in the Houses of Parliament was quite clear that subsidies were relied upon 'to provide a business profit'.
The new system based on Environmental Land Management schemes pays farmers for providing 'public goods' such as environmental improvements. The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) also pays farmers to adopt and maintain sustainable farming practices that can protect and enhance the natural environment alongside food production, although that itself hit the headlines when it was halted in March, with no new SFI applications accepted after this date until a spending review was completed.
'I can actually see some sense in what the RSPB are doing in terms of economics,' says Mark Bousfield, who has lived and farmed sheep in the Swindale valley for most of his life. 'The farms here wouldn't survive without the enhancements the Government gives. But the government subsidies now aren't in food production, really, they're in environmental payouts.'
But this isn't just a debate about economics or livelihoods. Spend any time with the people who live and work here, and they're also worried that these environmental schemes are not actually being managed properly.
Magnus McIntosh lives at the end of the valley and with his wife, he's refurbished a derelict farmhouse once used by a local artist captivated by the views. It's still off-grid, and their young son was the first child to be born here in decades.
'We have a responsibility to nurture the environment and protect habitats,' he says. 'The area around here is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and it's one of the reasons we came here.
'The hay meadows are incredible; in 1985, they were one of the most species-rich in north-west Cumbria.
But my worry is that the removal of sheep and a lot of the RSPB projects are actually having a detrimental effect. The meadows have visibly declined; they do actually require careful management and a strict grazing regime.
'It's going to end up being a bleak little valley with reeds everywhere and dead grass. It feels like there's a lot of money being wasted; rewilding schemes today appear driven by funding opportunities rather than genuine care for wildlife and long-term ecological health.'
For McIntosh, it's about conserving, improving and enhancing the landscape as it is now, not trying to return it to how it was 1,000 years ago. You get the sense that his local MP, Tim Farron, recognises there's a real issue here, too.
'There is definitely an ideological and unjustified determination to massively reduce, if not remove, the presence of sheep from the Lake District,' he says. 'And I think that is dangerous, and based upon this idea that we're massively overgrazed. Now that was the case before foot-and-mouth, but that was a generation ago.
'So a lot of the understanding about the relationship between sheep numbers and the nature of the environment is just massively, inexcusably out of date. And what that leads to is this sense that sheep are somehow like locusts, which I think a lot of non-farmers seem to believe. If you go for wilderness solutions, you don't always get biodiversity – you get invasive species taking over.'
Farron thinks that removing sheep from the Lake District landscape is as much a potential branding issue too. 'Would Unesco take away their World Heritage Site status from the Lake District? I mean, they could if you look at the citation, it specifically credits farmers for the way the landscape looks. And that would be devastating.'
So what is the solution? For Farron, it's perfectly clear what needs to be done.
'One really simple thing under the stewardship schemes is that you are entitled as a farmer to take an option to create woodland pasture, where you can grow trees, and graze animals – but only if they're cattle. What we desperately need is a woodland pasture option in the uplands that allows people to be sheep farmers as well, allowing for the differences in how they graze.
'So I think, rather than everyone getting in their bunkers and shouting at each other, there's a perfectly sensible, clever way we can move forward here, where we do protect nature, we do grow trees, and we also maintain the importance to our heritage, our landscape, our environment and our food production capabilities.'
As the sun begins to go down on another perfect Lake District day, the RSPB seems just as keen not to get embroiled in a culture war. Woodland pasture, of course, is what the RSPB is actually proposing for Swindale – although currently Farron doubts whether it could or would put sheep there at the moment.
'People will have different opinions on what we are doing here,' admits Swainson. 'But we will always try to continue a good relationship with everyone; there are ways in which every facet of life in this valley can work together.'
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