Preliminary Programme

In recent years, studies of landscape change in nineteenth-century Britain have begun to explore the role of colonial ideologies in shaping agricultural ‘improvement’. The work of scholars such as Iain McKinnon has shown how acts such as the Highland Clearances rested upon imposing systems of ‘domestic colonisation’ that held striking similarities with the dispossession of native peoples enacted across the Empire. This paper, therefore, investigates contemporaneous efforts to ‘civilize’ and ‘improve’ Exmoor. The ‘reclamation’ schemes conducted by the Knight Family between 1818 and 1880 provide an opportunity to assess the discourses, deployment, and socio-environmental impacts of ‘internal colonialism’. During this period, local landscapes, customary agricultural practices, communities, flora and fauna were systemically denigrated, dispossessed, and remade. Exmoor was recast as a ‘void and empty space’, with its ‘hostile’ soil a reflection of the economic inefficiency and moral turpitude of local cultivators. In contrast, the ‘foreign’ farmers recruited from Lincolnshire or Scotland by the Knights to replace ‘native’ populations became ‘heroic’ settlers bringing civilization to a barbaric wilderness.
As in many regions, the ‘colonisation’ of Exmoor had long-term consequences for local biodiversity. Understanding how ‘internal colonialism’ was culturally perceived, discursively legitimised, and materially deployed is thus vital to ongoing conservation efforts. (Show less)

Although John and Frederick Knight initiated the reclamation of Exmoor, the task of creating profitable farms fell to the tenant-farmers in the years after the end of John Knight’s ‘demesne-farming’ experiment in 1840. The first generation of farmers, recruited by the Knights and their agent Robert Smith, struggled with the terrain, climate, unfinished buildings, rent arrears and lack of capital. C.S. Orwin’s history of the reclamation process charted a few of their successes and many of their failures, but it raises the question of the place of Exmoor in the farming careers of these incomers. Why did these farmers and their families move from the English Midlands to take on new farms carved out of an inhospitable terrain, lacking in infrastructure, roads and housing? What happened after they gave up the unequal struggle on Exmoor? The paper seeks to place their experiences on Exmoor in context of their origins and backgrounds, and tries to track their subsequent histories. The focus of the ‘Reclaiming Exmoor’ Project is to explain why and with what ecological, agrarian and social consequences, farmers impacted Exmoor. This paper reverses this perspective, and explores what impact the reclamation effort had on the farmers who attempted it. (Show less)

Spaces such as Exmoor are viewed with increasing interest by policy makers concerned with addressing a range of wicked environmental challenges that face our current society. These include the potential of these spaces to do things for us such as mitigate climatic change, either through programmes of restoration on peatlands, or extensive tree planting. Such modern interventions have the potential to have lasting impacts on the character of these rural environments. Good, sustainable, decision making for land management should integrate historical knowledge to understand the trajectories by which the current landscape has been configured, and the social and ecological processes that were involved in this. This paper will reflect on the changing role of historical knowledge in conservation, using the “Reclaiming Exmoor” project as a lens. Rather than project Exmoor as a damaged tabula rasa waiting to be restored back to some fictional notion of natural ecological functioning, it will be argued that a biocultural heritage approach can provide a new way of generating positive landscape change. (Show less)