WILLIAM BUNTING – ECO-WARRIOR(ARMED WING)

Following an article on THORNE MOORS and PEAT BOGS in today’s Guardian I thought this historical link was of interest! George Monbiot move over!

William Bunting: Thorne Moors Greatest Defender! In the early 1950s, an irascible, uncompromising man called William Bunting arrived in Thorne. Born in Barnsley in 1916 he had acted as a courier and smuggler for the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. Fascinated by the moors, Bunting became a self-taught naturalist. His discoveries include a species of alga that lives on the antenna of microscopic water fleas, and as well as this he was the first person to draw attention to the Bronze Age wooden pathway under Thorne Moors. Angered by the publication in 1952 of West Riding County Council’s footpath map, showing no paths at all on Thorne, Bunting taught himself to read Latin, Medieval English and Norman French so to acquaint himself with the confused and arcane laws and administrative regulations on public rights-of-way. With this knowledge he fought the illegal enclosure of Thorne through the courts for the next two decades. He also continued to walk the old footpaths, removing obstacles and confronting angry landowners as he went. When walking on the moors he carried a gun, a walking stick concealing a razor-sharp sabre, a machete and his wire cutters. When asked if he had ever had occasion to fire a gun while on the moors, he roared, “What do you think I use them for, picking my bloody nose?” In the early 1960s, conventional wisdom was that farming and peat digging had already ruined Thorne Moors and it was generally regarded as a piece of wasteland. The Yorkshire Naturalists’ Trust voted not to object to a plan to dump fuel ash on the moors. Bunting, outraged, wrote scathing letters, compiled reports and badgered the organisation’s leading lights to come and see for themselves. They reversed their decision. Bunting defeated numerous plans for similar schemes. As well as the planners and developers, Bunting also had to fight the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC – a precursor of English Nature) which had denied for many years that there was anything of interest on Thorne Moors. In late 1971, Fisons excavated several deep drains that threatened to destroy completely the richest part of the area. With the heart of the moors at risk, Bunting and a group of naturalists, local residents and students from a number of northern universities took matters into their own hands. Calling themselves Bunting’s Beavers, the group went onto the Moors practically every weekend throughout the spring and summer of 1972 to dam the drains. Fisons’ workers were unable to keep up with them and by the early autumn dozens of dams had been built, some of them more than forty feet thick. In October 1972, shortly after a BBC TV crew filmed the Beavers at work, Fisons dynamited 18 of the dams. The Beavers repaired the dams, and Fisons, which had been showered with unfavourable publicity, let the new dams stand. Fisons eventually entered into an agreement to protect that area from drainage and cutting, and to reinforce several of the Beavers’ dams and eleven years later, the NCC bought 180 acres of it and declared it a National Nature Reserve. William Bunting died in 1995, having been pensioned out of the army in the late 1940s with TB and diagnosed shortly afterward with a crippling inflammation of the vertebrae. He was ill and in terrible pain for much of his life, yet without his obsessive and aggressive protection, Thorne Moors would have been destroyed long ago. We take his words to heart: “I suggest that the essence of conservation lies with one simple word, NO! Don’t become like those prostitutes in the Nature Conservancy. Say no, mean no, fight to retain the places we have.” Source: Thorne Moors by Catherine Caufield (Sumach Press, 1991)