Dartmoor in Devon, the UK’s most southerly upland, is seldom far from the national headlines. The term ‘contested landscape’ might as well have been invented for this National Park.
Tony Whitehead asks, despite more than thirty years of agri-environment schemes, large reductions in livestock numbers, and millions of pounds of public investment in the form of payments to commoners, why do Dartmoor’s protected sites remain in such poor ecological condition?