The track up to Bowderdale Farm climbs out of the Eden Valley through stone-walled fields the colour of pale moss. At the cattle grid the walls give way to open ground, and the fields run uninterrupted up to the saddle of Roman Fell.

Six years ago this was sheep ground. The grass was cropped so tight you could see the soil through it in late summer. The rushes had been topped annually with a tractor. The skylarks had gone.

Now the rushes stand thigh-high in the wetter hollows. The grass is long enough to bend in the wind. A curlew, the first of the morning, lifts from a tussock and circles, calling, until it has passed beyond the fell.

Helen Birkett watches it from the gate. She is forty-eight, the third generation of her family to farm Bowderdale, and the first to stop putting sheep on it.

The decision was made in 2019, after a long and difficult conversation around the kitchen table. Her father, John, had farmed the place since 1973, taking it over from his own father. The flock at its peak ran to nine hundred Swaledale and Mule ewes across twelve hundred acres of common and inbye land.

The farm had not been profitable for over a decade. Direct payments from the EU Common Agricultural Policy had kept it afloat. After Brexit those payments were being phased out and replaced with the Sustainable Farming Incentive and the Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier, schemes that paid farmers for environmental outcomes rather than for stocking density.

The family ran the numbers twice. Then they took the sheep off.

Helen does not use the word rewilding unless she is talking to journalists, and even then with a certain reluctance. The neighbours, she says, hear the word and assume she has stopped farming. She has not stopped farming. She has started farming for different things.

What she farms now, she says, is grass, water, and birds.

“What she farms now, she says, is grass, water, and birds.”

The transformation has been documented since 2020 by Dr. Olivia Reed, an ecologist at the University of Cumbria, whose long-term study of post-sheep grassland recovery in the northern Pennines includes Bowderdale as one of nine sites.

Reed's monitoring shows a vegetation shift that is rapid in some respects and slow in others. By 2022 the average sward height in the formerly grazed fields had increased from 3 centimetres to 18 centimetres. By 2024 the species count in fixed quadrats had risen from 9 to 23, with returns of devil's-bit scabious, yellow rattle, and ragged robin.

The peat in the upland hollows, which had been drying out under heavy stocking, is showing early signs of rewetting. Sphagnum mosses have appeared in two of the wettest flushes for the first time since the 1980s.

The bird counts are the part the family talks about most.

Curlew, Numenius arquata, declared red-listed in the United Kingdom in 2015, had reduced to a single nesting pair on the farm by 2018. In 2023 the breeding bird survey, conducted by a team from the British Trust for Ornithology in partnership with Reed, recorded four pairs. In 2025 the figure was seven.

Snipe and lapwing have returned in smaller numbers. A pair of short-eared owls bred on the lower fell in 2024 and 2025.

The skylarks are everywhere again.

The family has not gone entirely without livestock. A small herd of native belted Galloway cattle, twenty-three animals at the last count, grazes the rougher ground at low density. Their hooves break up the rush litter and create small bare patches that support invertebrate populations. Their dung supports dung beetles, which support the meadow pipits that feed on the dung beetles, which support the merlin that hunts the meadow pipits.

Helen's brother Rob, who runs the cattle, says the Galloways are the easiest livestock he has ever managed. They calve outside, eat what they find, and require almost no intervention.

Income comes from a combination of stewardship payments, a small holiday cottage in a converted byre, a forthcoming carbon credit scheme that Helen is sceptical of but has registered for, and the cattle, which are sold to a regional beef cooperative at premium prices.

The farm grosses less than it did in 2018 but costs less to run. The family is, by a narrow margin, better off.

There are critics. A neighbouring hill farmer, who declined to be named, told a local newspaper in 2024 that Bowderdale was being turned into a wildlife park and that the next generation would not know how to keep sheep. Helen has heard the comment and is, in her careful way, sympathetic to the underlying anxiety.

Sheep farming on the Cumbrian fells is a culture as much as an industry. It has produced the landscape that visitors come to see. It has also produced, over centuries, a landscape impoverished in species and structure compared to what preceded it.

Helen does not think the answer is to remove all sheep from all the fells. She thinks the answer is for different farms to do different things, and for Bowderdale, with its particular soils and aspect and small wet hollows, to do this.

Her father, now seventy-eight, walks up the track most mornings with the dog. He is quieter than he used to be on the subject of the changes. Last spring he stood at the top gate for a long time, watching a curlew come in to land in the long grass, and said only that he had not heard one calling that close to the farmhouse since he was a boy.

On the path back down, a small flock of meadow pipits rises from the bracken and scatters across the slope. The Galloways stand in a loose group near the beck, unconcerned. Somewhere a curlew calls again.

The fell holds its weather. The light moves across the long grass. The farm, in its new way, gets on with the work.