The New Naturalist series has done Dartmoor (twice!), while Exmoor remains somewhat neglected by naturalists, possibly owing to its relative isolation and distance from centres of population. But in some ways, it’s the most interesting; it may lack the geological distinctiveness of Dartmoor or Bodmin, and is also less completely ‘upland’ in character, but it has something that Dartmoor and Bodmin both lack – a coast. And what a coast it is! Including England’s highest sea cliff, Ulf-Hansen describes it as ‘the wildest stretch of shoreline to be found anywhere in England’, and few would argue with that. For 59 km, one can reach the sea in only seven places, and some of those seven have fascinating stories, not least Porlock Bay, which also provides a useful antidote to the idea that we could control the sea if only we had a big enough bulldozer.
Flemming Ulf-Hansen is an ecologist with long experience working in wildlife conservation, much of it on Exmoor, and its wild, inaccessible coast is clearly his favourite habitat. But other detailed chapters provide exhaustive coverage of Exmoor’s other main habitats: freshwater, mires and bogs, heathland, woodland and farmland. These tell us almost all there is to know about Exmoor and its wildlife, or at least as much as can be packed into 500 densely-filled pages.
A final chapter looks at conservation on Exmoor, its history, its present state and its possible future. Ulf-Hansen tries to be cheerful, and indeed there are things to celebrate, such as the return of otters and the reintroduction of beaver and pine marten, but this chapter has a somewhat gloomy tone. Not least because some of Exmoor’s problems, like air pollution and climate change, are beyond anyone’s power to influence, at least anyone on Exmoor. Not that everything that we can control actually gets done, or not always; Ulf-Hansen hates invasive Rhododendron ponticum with a passion, and nothing frustrates him more than an inability to deal with some infestations, owing to uncooperative landowners, shortage of cash or just plain bureaucracy.
But Ulf-Hansen is clearly a glass-half-full kind of person, and a streak of cheerfulness runs through the book. He quotes Daniel Defoe on Exmoor’s upland peatlands: ‘Cambden calls it a filthy, barren ground, and, indeed, so it is’, but he still can’t resist a section entitled ‘Peatland’s Charms’. He also knows a good thing when he sees one, for example this comment on Watersmeet House: ‘Stopping here, to enjoy the sounds of rushing water whilst appreciating a quality cream tea, is highly recommended’. Recognising that it’s an uphill struggle to make long lists of tiny and hard-to-identify species interesting, he suggests at one point that the reader must ‘draw breath, perhaps gathering energy from a chunk of Exmoor fudge with a cup of Miles tea [a famous Exmoor brand] and be prepared for some heavy biological lifting’. And it’s impossible not to be cheered by the advice, for those wanting to know more about the Valley of Rocks’ herd of feral goats, to listen to the relevant episode of Mark Steel’s In Town.
A minor niggle (a very minor one, but book reviewers do have to show they’ve been paying attention and not just enjoying themselves) is species names. I know it’s not easy, in a book of this sort, to strike the right balance between common and Latin names, but I’m not sure the balance is right here. If you know enough about craneflies to know that you’re looking at Tricyphona immaculata, why would you ever call it a Single-striped Black Hairy-eye? And is there anyone on the planet who would know what you’re talking about? A quick Google suggests the answer to that question is: no. Surely if you use a common name, there must be at least a possibility that the man in the street (or even the entomologist in the street) would recognise it. Sometimes, even the author is bamboozled by a rogue ‘common’ name: the improbably-named Cow-horn Bog-moss is Sphagnum denticulatum, but a few pages later it’s S. auriculatum. Mind you, I’m prepared to make an exception for the quite wonderful No Parking Whitebeam, Sorbus admonitor.
Exmoor is (at the time of writing) the latest New Naturalist, and the 150th in a series that began in 1945. As a serial reviewer of recent titles in the series, I’m starting to run out of superlatives, but saying that Exmoor is as good as all the others is the highest praise I can think of.
