This land is in the middle of Britain’s temperate rainforest belt. It is now almost treeless, and remarkably lifeless. It’s kept in this state by European farm subsidies. Whether in or out, we need radical reform of a system that rewards continued ecological destruction. 
Several people have asked for the location. It's Foel Cae'r Berllan, in Snowdonia, looking north. Almost all the uplands of Britain, shockingly, are in a similar state.
This photo of a tiny remaining fragment of temperate rainforest, Wistman's Wood on Dartmoor, by Neil Burnell, reminds us of what we're missing across much of Western Britain. Why isn't its restoration, on our deforested hills, an ecological priority?
In case you missed it, here's a map of where you would expect to find rainforest growing in Britain. Source: kundoc.com/pdf-oceanic-an… … Brexit or no Brexit, let's bring some of it back.
The hygrothermic contour (supported in many places by pollen samples and other palaeontology) suggests that the natural vegetation type on the high ground of Bodmin, Dartmoor, Exmoor, most of Wales, Lake District, parts of the Pennines and Western Scotland is temperate rainforest
Even in our national parks, farm subsidies, combined with truly daft "conservation" policies, ensure that trees cannot return to our deforested hills. Public money is used to keep them bare. How many people would consent to this, if they fully understood the implications?
On Dartmoor and Exmoor, the land is burnt at the direction of the national park authorities, to prevent natural succession from occuring. Imagine what we would say if we saw this happening in another country!
Here's my talk, gallantly hosted by the UK National Parks Conference, explaining just how crazy it has all become.
I'm shocked by the number of farmers seeing the photo at the top of this thread and saying "trees would never grow there". 3 miles away, on Cadair Idris, are native trees growing higher than anywhere in the picture. The natural treeline at this latitude is c.1000m. This is 300m.
It's a constant refrain heard by those of us who seek to bring woodland back to our bare hills: "trees would never grow there". It doesn't seem to matter how often it's disproved. Some people stick to this mistaken belief through thick and thin.
There's a powerful desire to believe that the bare, treeless state of our hills is natural. It isn't. In most places, it's the result of grazing. Sheep seek out and selectively browse tree seedlings, which are highly nutritious. Forests can't regenerate, and slowly disappear.
In some parts of our uplands, you can see it happening today. Woods in which there is no tree younger than 100 years old, due to sheep browsing under them. The old trees slowly dying off, with nothing to replace them. It's not meant to happen, but the rules aren't well enforced.
Grazing is likely to have been a wider cause of deforestation in the uplands than tree felling by humans, though each reinforces the other. On the highest lands, the trees weren't worth cutting. But their slow-growing seedlings were highly susceptible to browsing pressure.
There's a widely circulated myth: that livestock pasture sequesters more carbon than woodland. Net carbon sequestration in active pasture is rare and generally temporary. It tends to be much smaller, in countries like the UK, than in woodland regeneration fcrn.org.uk/sites/default/…
The key metric in all these calculations is Carbon Opportunity Cost (COC). What is the cost of doing A instead of B? The COC of pastured meat is truly massive: much, much higher than any of the other food sources in this study: nature.com/articles/s4158…
