In November 2018 we blogged about a local community in the North York Moors National Park that had called a public meeting to discuss concerns about grouse moor management in the area (see here).
This wasn’t just a flash in the pan, one-off event. Some members of this community in Goathland are clearly agitated about the damaging environmental impact of grouse moor management and are determined to do something about it.
Here’s Goathland, in the heart of this National Park and practically surrounded by driven grouse moors:
On Wednesday evening a second public meeting was held and the following notes were written and posted on Twitter by Richard Gray (@glaisdale1001) on Thursday:
Obviously these notes should be viewed as the personal opinion of one attendee and not as a formal record of what took place but nevertheless they make for an interesting read.
It’s really encouraging to see a local community willing to get together and speak out like this and it looks like this is just the beginning for Goathland.
Undoubtedly there are communities in other parts of northern England where the landscape is dominated by driven grouse moors that will share the Goathland community’s environmental concerns and “general feeling of no confidence in Natural England“. Hopefully those communities will now be inspired by Goathland and start to question and challenge the status quo in their own areas.
Well done, Goathland!
UPDATE 11 January 2019: Additional notes from the 2nd Goathland meeting on grouse moor management (here)
Raptor Persecution UK 
What a cracking, no nonsense piece of writing – brilliant! The author should consider writing for Private Eye. Can’t be much fun being surrounded by grouse moors, rather limited recreation and employment opportunities.
DO Natural England get mentioned in Private Eye? I would enjoy reading that!
PE do seem to finally be waking up to the criminality of the grouse shooting industry. It has taken a long time but a couple of recent pieces are encouraging. Hopefully one day they will do a proper in depth piece on the corruption, collusion and criminality of the shooting industry.
Well done Goathland.
At least ‘dogging and drug abuse’ only harms (arguably) the participants…..and has little or no effect on the natural environment.
This is a perfect example of the hegemonic abuse on which much of the driven grouse moors depend. Often unseen but always present, it is accompanied by the unspoken threat of retaliation in social and financial terms by those who do not both comply and remain silent. The use of public money by these modren “Robber Barons” is also unacceptable.
This good news to hear that an ordinary village is fighting back against the local surrounding grouse moors (owned by people who think of themselves as the masters) George Winn Darley was the in house agent at Swinton before he inherited Spaunton Estate and we all know that Swinton estate was and is a site suffering a multitude of wildlife criminality. He is also the chair of the local Tory party and a big wig in the local hunt ( pause to spit feathers!). They deselected their sitting MP Ann Mackintosh allegedly because she did not support hunting or driven grouse shooting. Time for the forelock tuggers in every similarly affected area to stand up to these bullies, environmental despoilers and spenders of our taxes, as NE have patently failed to do. These people are heroes, well done!
Good news.
Doug
Well Done Goathland,how refreshing to see Ordinary Folk standing up against the Sham that is driven grouse shooting .And no doubt this will start happening in many places in the near Future.