The story of an exposed hill farm’s transformation into a wildlife sanctuary

AHEM ... here's a rather handsome tribute to the publication now in your hands. "The one newspaper that has consistently written a full coverage of our work is the Darlington & Stockton Times.

Their journalists not only listen to what we tell them, but take the trouble to write about how we are trying to achieve our aims."

The author of this blush-inducing compliment is Hugh Kemp. His subject is the remarkable co-endeavour, undertaken over the past 41 years with his wife, Jane, in transforming some of the bleakest uplands in the Yorkshire Dales into a notable wildlife haven, now gaining fame for its population of red squirrels. As Mr Kemp himself put it: "We have created an oasis in this harsh environment."

Mind you, that happy outcome was far from his mind when he and Jane moved to Mirk Pot Farm, in Snaizeholme, high above Hawes.

He admitted: "I wasn't remotely interested in conservation. I wanted to make money. We had no idea then that our place would become an unofficial nature reserve and I would take groups of people round."

Mr Kemp made these observations in a book which describes in detail the evolution of Mirk Pot from an exposed hill farm to a sanctuary for wildlife. Underpinned by endless toil, tree-planting and the creation of ponds largely worked the miracle.

But Mr Kemp's book does far more than its title, Trees and Wildlife in Wensleydale, suggests.

For it is a richly-packed memoir of his extraordinary life, which led him to Snaizeholme via Kent, a Hebridean island, and even a Staffordshire coal mine.

Yet he was born in York, in 1927, the son of a Post Office land agent and his wife. His father's work took the family to the Midlands, where Mr Kemp studied art at Birmingham.

Afterwards, in deference to his parents' strong Quaker beliefs, he opted to work as a miner (a socalled Bevin Boy, named after the Minister for Labour, Ernest Bevin) rather than do his national service.

Much of his two years at that Staffordshire pit were spent underground hauling tubs - six days a week.

His paternal grandfather farmed at Kirkbymoorside, on the edge of the North York Moors.

It was perhaps a countryman's gene which asserted itself down the pit, where Mr Kemp found "the sweet smell of the larch (pit props) was such a strong reminder of life on the surface."

Liberated on his 21st birthday, and by then married, he set up home with his wife on a Thames houseboat.

He worked briefly as a relief lockkeeper before he and his wife ran a smallholding in Kent, where Mr Kemp kept goats and began growing Christmas trees.

But the marriage was failing. An attempt to shore it up took the couple to a small island in the Inner Hebrides. They lived in a shack while renovating a crofter's cottage, where Mr Kemp planned to work as an artist.

But the marriage collapsed anyway.

Revisiting Kent, Mr Kemp met and soon married an old friend, his present wife. But their efforts to move to the North York Moors, returning to Mr Kemp's farming roots, foundered on high property prices.

Mr Kemp said: "There were a lot of successful estates, and the few places with land were snapped up by businessmen from Teesside."

He went on: "So, with a heavy heart, we began taking the Yorkshire Dales weekly newspaper, the Darlington & Stockton Times."

One day, Mrs Kemp chuckled as she scanned the property pages.

Mr Kemp recalled her saying: "Listen to this. For sale: Mirk Pot and Cow Hill. With a name like that, we're bound to end up there."

And they did, arriving with their two toddler sons in March 1967.

They had bought the two farmhouses - Cow Hill long abandoned and waist-deep in manure - and 90 acres despite Mr Kemp's fear that the land, between 925ft and 1,200ft above sea level, was too windswept and had too many rock outcrops for his prime purpose of growing Christmas trees.

Locals warned him: "Trees will never grow in Snaizeholme."

But they did, and the Kemps were also able to convert old buildings, including (with a heroic struggle) Cow Hill, into holiday homes.

Pupils from Leyburn School helped with early Christmas tree harvests. "I think the Dales youngsters are probably some of the toughest people in the UK," said Mr Kemp.

A turning point came when he visited a British Trust for Ornithology exhibition. Designed to promote woodland diversity for wildlife, it persuaded Mr Kemp to plant and manage his woods differently, mainly by intermixing native deciduous species with his original plantation conifers. A few years later, a forestry worker told the Kemps he had seen a red squirrel.

The sighting was discounted, and two years elapsed before further sightings put the presence of red squirrels, previously extinct in the wild in Yorkshire, beyond doubt.

Believed to have originated in Cumbria, there is now a colony of perhaps 20 in the small valley.

Mr Kemp recorded, while writing his book last year: "Only this morning, I saw a red squirrel sitting on a shovel under a feeder, looking very much at home."

Feeders now supplement food from natural sources. Chief are larches, prominent in Mr Kemp's plantings from the start. Their crowns are now being carefully thinned, to let in more light and encourage production of the seed-bearing cones.

Mr Kemp is also convinced that certain planting carried out to attract black grouse has also helped the squirrels.

Though the black grouse haven't appeared, there have been other successes. The bird count has risen from 25 species to about 70, of which 30 are present all the year. A water vole has been sighted at one of the ponds, and the pine marten is occasionally seen.

The opening of clearings has attracted six or seven species of butterfly.

Nature continually springs surprises.

Doing well as an introduced species, imported from Teesdale, is juniper. Checking its growth a year ago, Mr Kemp was delighted to discover a surrounding carpet of heather, attractively on a slope above a pond.

Owing to a long-established population of orchids, Mirk Pot became for a time a nature reserve of the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust.

Strangely, it lacks that status now.

Mr Kemp has also found the Environment Agency to be uninterested in either Mirk Pot's ponds or its red squirrels. Though Defra, the Forestry Commission and the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority have been supportive, Mr Kemp's accounts of meetings with a seemingly endless string of officials from a multiplicity of bodies suggest much duplication in the conservation world, often yielding conflicting advice, or even changing advice from a single source.

But Mr Kemp has his own vision.

"Sometimes people think we are running Mirk Pot exclusively for the red squirrels," he explained.

"But we want to make our few acres acceptable for stoats, weasels and hedgehogs, and our growing number of birds." Now 81, he added: "I would like to acquire a ten- or 20-acre field up on the fells, fence it off and see what might emerge."

Clearly, the energy and passion which have created a unique corner of the Dales are far from spent yet.

● Trees and Wildlife in Wensleydale (Arima Publishing, Bury St Edmunds, tel: 01284-700321, £9.99), is available from Mason Bros, Market Place, Hawes DL8 3QX, tel: 01969-667278.

● The national park has a guided walk to Snaizeholme; tel: 01969- 666210. Organised parties can visit by arrangement with Mr Kemp, tel: 01969-667510, or email kemp@mirk-pot.freeserve.co.uk.

How estate pecking order revealed culture clash

A STRIKING clash of cultures appears in Mr Kemp's autobiography.

It began when a couple from Lancashire stopped to chat with Mr and Mrs Kemp.

The husband said how lucky they were to live in such a lovely place. Mr Kemp said there was a shortage of carpenters in the Dales, so why didn't the couple move there?

They did, with the husband working on the Duke of Devonshire's Wharfedale estate. All went well until - in Mr Kemp's words - "they realised there was a pecking order among all the estate workers. The foresters were at the top, followed by the farm workers". The carpenter's wife, university-educated and from Kent, "found it rather difficult to observe these estate niceties," especially "the need to be careful which of their neighbours it was considered socially acceptable to converse with".

She was also unhappy that "all the wives and daughters of the workers were expected to curtsy when encountering the Duchess". For his part, the husband "was appalled that the house employed so many people, when the family were only in residence for a few weeks each year".

Unhappily, a move to Hawes, where the husband worked for a local tradesman, also proved unsuccessful and the couple returned to Kent.