Farming the Hill

Powys is about two-thirds grassland and rough grazing and it holds several million sheep. That single fact explains more of what you see out of a car window here than all the castles put together.

Why sheep

Because of what the ground will bear. Above about 250 metres the growing season is too short and the soil too thin and acid for arable, and the rainfall on the western uplands runs to well over 2,000 millimetres a year. What that country will support is grass, and what eats grass on steep wet ground and looks after itself is sheep.

The Welsh Mountain is the standard breed: small, hardy, and hefted, meaning a flock learns its own patch of unfenced hill and stays on it, passing the knowledge down the ewe line. Sell a hefted flock away and the ground has to be re-learned from scratch, which is why flocks are usually sold with the farm.

The Kerry Hill, from the country south-east of Newtown, and the Beulah Speckled Face from the Irfon uplands are both Powys breeds.

The old system

Before enclosure, upland farming worked on two settlements. The hendre was the winter place, down in the valley on the better ground, with the house and the enclosed fields. The hafod was the summer dwelling on the mountain, where stock went from May to autumn while hay grew below.

That is transhumance and it persisted in mid Wales later than in most of Britain. Hundreds of hafod sites are recorded on the Powys commons, usually as low rectangular platforms with a scatter of stone.

Between the enclosed land and the open mountain sits the ffridd: rough grazing, part improved, walled off, and the single most informative zone in any upland parish. It is where the abandoned fields are.

Enclosure and improvement

Parliamentary enclosure, mostly between 1790 and 1830, took the commons into private hands and ended the old grazing arrangements. The straight drystone walls running across open Radnorshire hillsides are enclosure walls and they date from specific Acts.

Improvement followed: liming, draining, reseeding. Lime kilns are everywhere because acid upland grass needs it, and the tramroads and canals that carried limestone were built with agriculture as much as industry in mind.

The twentieth century

Two wars pushed the plough back up the hill under state direction, and the War Agricultural Executive Committees of 1939 to 1945 had powers to dispossess a farmer judged to be underperforming.

Afterwards came subsidy. Headage payments from the 1970s and 1980s paid per animal, which did exactly what anyone would expect: stocking rates rose sharply and a great deal of upland was overgrazed. Later reform decoupled payment from headage and current schemes pay for environmental outcomes instead, which is reshaping the hill again.

Farm amalgamation has run steadily throughout. A holding that supported a family in 1900 supports part of a much larger business now, which is a substantial part of the depopulation story.

What to look for

Hedgerows and walls. Species-rich mixed hedges with irregular lines are old, often medieval. Straight walls with few species are enclosure. The difference is visible from any ridge.

Ridge and furrow on valley floors, where the ground was once ploughed in strips and has been pasture ever since.

Sheepfolds, circular or rectangular stone enclosures on open hill, often at a junction of boundaries where several flocks were sorted.

Bank barns and longhouses, where house and byre share one roof under one long range. The Black Mountains have the best surviving examples.

Field names on the tithe apportionment, which record use — the barn field, the cattle moor, the flax field — long after the use has stopped.