Madam,

Regarding last week’s story, £350,000 to restore windswept mountain, about how the Woodland Trust and Wales Wild Land Foundation have bought a part of Cefn Coch, Glaspwll.

The way in which their campaign to raise funds has been conducted has insulted many of the indigenous people of the area.

Key photographs used online and in the press to encourage people to donate funds towards the purchase included large swathes of land which are not up for sale, and implied that the land was neglected and under some form of threat.

Many of those who donated money may therefore be surprised to learn that the land is overwhelmingly ungrazed moorland, and has been for centuries, if not millennia.

In terms of the claims that the area is “neglected”, this is extremely insulting to those who have farmed the area for thousands of years, including Richard Edwards, who farmed the land (which is actually part of Llechwedd Einion, not Cefn Coch) in the 1840s, when it was described as ‘pasture’ in the tithe records - as confirmed by George Borrow in his 1862 book Wild Wales.

If any neglect has occurred in the last century which has resulted in this land becoming “ecologically degraded”, as depicted by the Woodland Trust and Wales Wild Land Foundation, it is the neglect by government bodies and charities which resulted in reductions in the number of grazing animals which had been there for many hundreds of years - animals which have been essential in maintaining habitats needed by species such as curlews, which need open moorland to survive and cannot live in woodland.

Over the last century, the people of the Dyfi valley have seen tens of thousands of acres planted with trees, destroying habitats, entire communities and farms. The employment provided by such initiatives has dwindled and fallen compared with what was originally promised, despite such plantations being entirely commercial.

Meanwhile, obligations under the 1947 Agriculture Act to control predators which take shelter and breed in government woodland have become largely ignored, leading to increases in livestock losses on neighbouring land and the destruction of wild species of the sort the Woodland Trust and Wales Wild Land Foundation would see protected.

Farms now completely engulfed by trees and lost forever within just a stone’s throw of this site include Castell, Huraidd, Maes Cilin, Brwyno Uchaf, Brwyno and Waun Pwll.

The replacement of viable farmland with yet more woodland by an outside body is therefore a cause of major concern for those with roots in the Dyfi valley. Jobs for indigenous people in this type of sector seem few and far between, and the chances that wilding projects will replace local work seem very small based on experience.

Yours etc,

Aled Roberts, Montgomeryshire county chairman, FUW.

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