HEATHER - BURNING 407 



The Committee have now laid down the object of heather-bm'ning, the 

 methods of treatment of different types of ground and certain laws applicable 

 to all moors ; it only remains to discuss the practical steps the owner practical 

 of a badly burned moor must take to get his heather-land into " good '^^^i^'^" 

 heart " with the least possible delay. We will presume for the moment that the 

 moor under consideration is one of those many moors in England or Scotland 

 which has possibilities, but which has been neglected ; a moor which has its high 

 ground difficult to burn, its boggy undrained land, and its stretches of stick 

 heather with a tendency to revert to grass ; that, moreover, it is a moor which 

 has disease at irregular intervals as well as average and bumper years ; and that, 

 like all moors that form part of a tract of Grouse ground, it is liable to be over- 

 stocked at the critical period of late winter and early spring. 



The first thing that the owner of a moor of this sort must do is to decide 

 what rotation of heather crop is to be aimed at, i.e., what is the total choice of 

 area of moorland available, and how many acres of it are to be burned ^° '^ ^°"' 

 every year. 



The period of rotation requires very careful consideration, and depends on the 

 average age of the heather, the sporting results the moor-owner wishes to obtain 

 during the period of transition from bad conditions to good, and the local 

 difficulties — labour, climate, etc. From what has been stated on the results of 

 burning stick heather, it is evident that if really old heather bulks largely in 

 the total area it is impracticable to jump at once into a fifteen years' rotation and 

 maintain any stock of Grouse. A little calculation will show that in the extreme 

 case of a moor on which all the heather has reached the " keeper's delight " stage, 

 and therefore requires six to twenty years to come again, to burn the whole moor 

 in fifteen years would leave not only no spring feed, but scarcely any edible 

 heather at all. 



In treating a really badly burned moor, therefore, unless it is determined to 

 sacrifice several years of sport and set all the old heather ablaze, less heroic 

 methods should be adopted, and the ground be got gradually into a shortened 

 period of rotation. To fix how long this intermediate period should be, it is 

 necessary to go carefully over the burned ground of the last decade in order to 

 see how long the general average of burned heather takes to come to maturity. 

 This will vary, not only with the age of the heather, but with the elevation of 

 the moor, the climate and exposure, the depth of peat, the amount of fiow and 

 hard ground, and the stock of sheep. By carefully noting the results and 



