A significant portion of the Duchy tenants praise a new level of communication and response from the estate. “We’ve made a start,” says Bax. “We know it hasn’t always been the case. We want to lean into the community and be more active than we were in the past.”
The Dartmoor project is complicated. The Duchy has been there for 700 years, and its land comprises upland farms, property, commons (with historic grazing rights now in the news via a potential cull of Dartmoor ponies), tenant farmers, peat bogs and the Atlantic rainforest.
Its land is scarred by mining, tree felling, overgrazing, military marches, careless wild campers and cataclysmic climate-change predictions, from droughts to fire and floods.
There is no one clear view about what is best for the moor. The Duchy has decided that farming must work with “nature”: tree planting, biodiversity and the revival of peat bogs will take precedence, and farmers will be incentivised through subsidies and grants to fall in line.
Not every farmer will be on board, but plenty are doing their bit to bring back species including the marsh fritillary butterfly on their land already, and environmentalists are thrilled.
The Duchy is “being quite brave about it” says Tony Whitehead from the Dartmoor Nature Alliance, and “much more ambitious” with specific plans to plant trees. “What a thing to pass down to William’s children one day,” he says as he takes me on a walk to Wistman’s Wood, William’s precious and now expanding ancient oak woodland a couple of miles outside the village. “What a legacy.”
Dartmoor is one of five new “heartlands” identified by the Duchy – Cornwall, the Isles of Scilly, Bath and Kennington in south London are the others – with other parts of the old estate soon to be sold off to focus money and attention where staff think they can make the most difference. Twenty per cent of land in non-key areas such as Hertfordshire and Devon will be sold, raising an estimated £500m to be redeployed on projects closer to William’s heart, including homelessness.
It has left the Prince of Wales – unusually for one of the most popular members of the Royal family – in the role of “bad cop” on some fronts. Farmers in Bradninch, Devon, have spoken of being “furious”, “shocked” and “outraged” at plans to sell their farms, while the Duchy’s more positive spin is that many tenants find the prospect of buying their farms “genuinely exciting”, promising to support them “through this process with care and respect”.
In Dartmoor, where newcomers are called “blow-ins” and no one is worth speaking to until they have spent at least three winters there, they are trying to weave very different strands of what is described to me semi-seriously as a “micro-nation”: vastly different terrain, interests and problems, and a vocal community.
Prince William is open to hearing from those with other views, such as commercial farmers who need to graze livestock in numbers to make a living (“Don’t be polite because I’m in the room,” I have heard him say), but has his own views which, ultimately, form the basis of the Duchy’s policies.
He wants nature-forward goals, such as peat bogs being restored and the return of endangered species, and a financially secure future for the heart of the village that carries his name. These aims are not, the Duchy believes, mutually exclusive.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.telegraph.co.uk ’
