Posted by Gordon Pole on January 17, 1999 at 18:02:01:
In Reply to: Corned Beef posted by Frank Denton on January 16, 1999 at 23:48:57:
I don’t know about fires in the lake district, but in the hills of south west Scotland (Kirkudbrightshire) fifty miles further north, in the nineteen forties at least, the sheep farmers annually set fire to old grass to produce green shoots for the sheep. What exhilarating fun it was for a child - you made a torch out of dried grass which, once lit, you ran along the grass tufts which in turn caught light very easily. I can’t remember what time of the year this was done but I would have said around March.
Point being that such firing of the grass was easy to do. So presumably in high summer in a drought fire could spread quickly.
Alas, many of the Kirkudbrightshire hill sheep farms are now replaced by plantations of Sitka spruce; the price of a blackface fleece realising 40p making this unavoidable it seems. How have the Lake District hills survived this fate?
Gordon Pole