Regeneration game
It’s a warm summer’s day in the Lake District. I’m looking across Ullswater’s blue surface at the traditionally sheep-grazed eastern fells and walking through fields at Gowbarrow Hall farm with Anne Lloyd and daughter Claire Beaumont. As we walk, swallows and martins hawk overhead and peacock butterflies flit between flowerheads on patches of thistles. On this Lakeland farm, though, there is not a single sheep in sight.
“We are turning hill farming on its head,” Claire says. “It’s traditional to put the animals on higher ground in summer and bring them down to the in-bye land [near the farm buildings] in winter. But we’re putting the cattle and native fell ponies up on the higher land – we call it the Winter Block – to over-winter,” she says, pointing uphill.
“They graze in the rough
