West Fell : Monitoring and Results

As with the Cragend site, the cattle were condition scored before and after grazing the West Fell site. Surprisingly, although they did loose condition this loss was less than that for the Galloway and Blue Grey cows at Cragend.

The stock movement records from West Fell show that the cattle did eventually graze throughout the site. At first they concentrated on the lower sections, but as the season progressed they started to graze the site more or less evenly. As the cattle opened up the sward structure, the small flock of Hebredian sheep which also graze the site were able to take advantage of the more accessible grazing. In effect the cattle therefore created more grazing for the sheep, not less, as might have been expected.

As with Cragend, once the cattle came off West Fell, vegetation monitoring was carried out. Before the cattle were introduced, six fixed transects were set up. Two of these transects were open to both cattle and sheep grazing, two were fenced with electric fencing to exclude cattle but allow grazing by sheep, and two were fenced with stockproof fencing to exclude both cattle and sheep. Average molinia leaf length was calculated along each of these transects and, as expected, leaf length was significantly less along the grazed transects. There did not seem to be a significant reduction in the dominance of molinia at this stage, although the tussocky appearance of the site as a whole appeared to have been reduced.