NORTHUMBRIAN hill farmer Malcolm Corbett, of Dykehead Farm, Rochester, thought that he had completed his shift in agri-politics, having notched up years of sterling service with the National Farmers Union, the British Wool Marketing Board and the National Sheep Association.

Unfortunately, his plan to return to a quiet farming life out of the public eye – “because I thought everyone had probably heard enough of me” – has been stymied by the advent of the Lynx Trust UK’s well orchestrated campaign to have the large predator re-introduced to the UK countryside.

More specifically, it is that organisation’s choice of Northumberland’s Kielder Forest as its designated trial reintroduction site that has dragged Malcolm back into the public eye, for as that huge expanse of woodland stretches southwards, it envelopes his farm on two sides, putting him on the literal frontline of the conflict between rewilding enthusiasts and Northumberland’s hill flocks.

As the Lynx UK Trust awaits a response to its formal application to Natural England for a trial reintroduction licence, The Scottish Farmer visited Mr Corbett on-farm to get a grip on how it would feel to keep livestock one fence away from a population of big cats.

“The agenda to rewild, I think, is based on a total misunderstanding of where we live,” said Mr Corbett, as we considered an ordnance survey map of the Kielder forest in the kitchen at Dykehead.

“Yes, it is open space, but it is a managed landscape. We have farming and forestry, and on the back of that, a pretty healthy tourism industry.

“There is a mix here of both owned and tenanted farms, none of them on great ground, but all still major drivers of activity in the area. It is not a natural environment. We do not have that. Arguably, there are bits of Scotland that could be called wild, but not here,” he adds. “Unfortunately it is here the Lynx Trust are targetting for their trial release.”

Farmers in the area are still, he tells me, fuming over the Trust’s summer statement that accused the sheep industry of endemic welfare failures, and suggested rewilding as a way to ‘fix’ hill landscapes ‘damaged’ by the current farming sector’s shortcomings. As a Trust spokesperson bitingly put it: “We have had two years of the National Sheep Association’s reality-defying claims that six lynx will threaten the UK’s sheep industry and food security, but they have had almost nothing to say on the millions of lambs lost to welfare basics while they were busy doing it.”

Such emotive publicity, playing to the urban electorate’s limited knowledge of, and indeed limited sympathy for, hill farming, was typical of the Trust’s campaign tactics, said Mr Corbett, whose polite manner became increasingly strained as he discussed the mismatched war of words being conducted through the mainstream media.

“The influence that people like George Monbiot and Chris Packham have is frightening. The NSA can put out stuff on social media and it might get seen and liked by a few thousand people. These folk with mass media platforms, they can tweet something and reach millions of people, millions of people who vote, who elect MPs.

“But respectfully – no, in fact, I’m not going to say respectfully – the rewilding lobby just doesn’t understand the hills. The line is that these areas need ‘saved’, that the hills need ‘repaired’. But they aren’t broken!

“Most of the farms around here are in some sort of stewardship arrangement,” he notes. “There are certainly no farms doing any damage here – there are no intensive monocultures. Parts of it are undergrazed, frankly.

“We have deer, a healthy badger population, plenty of foxes, an exploding buzzard population – and of course we are one of the last bastions of the red squirrel. They tell us lynx will only take deer? They’ll take ground nesting birds, squirrels, sheep, young calves... anything they can catch.”

Given this disconnect with the realities of the UK countryside and its communities, there was, he said, great mistrust of the deeper ‘agenda’ driving the rewilding lobby, and indeed how it was being funded and organised. It was very easy, he suggested, for the lynx reintroduction campaign to be perceived as part of a broader attack on hill farming fuelled by the peculiarly urban beliefs that food is something found on supermarket shelves, and that landscapes are something to be looked at.

Mr Corbett was particularly scathing about Dr Paul O’Donoghue, the ‘chief scientific advisor’ to the Lynx UK Trust: “Everyone has got a bloody doctorate these days, haven’t they?” he smiled, grimly. “That man is at best economical with the truth... at worst a stranger to it.”

What the industry was focussed on now, he said, was ensuring that the decision on whether or not to approve the reintroduction licence goes all the way to the top, and rather then getting rubber-stamped somewhere in the civil service, ultimately lands on a minister’s desk “so we can have someone’s name to pin to the board and hold to account.”

“My concern – our concern – is that if you let this genie out of the bottle, for Mr Donoghue, it is job done. The application is for six lynx, three pairs – how many kittens can these animals have in five years? And if their trial goes without incident, and further releases are authorised? The thinking is that to establish an actual viable population of lynx, you’d need a genetic pool of upwards of 200 breeding pairs out there.”

Turning back to that map, he highlights that the central block of Kielder Forest is surrounded by satellite woodlands, islands of trees that could be a habitat for young lynx seeking their own territory, stepping stones to take them north-east all the way to the Cheviots, or due north, towards Bonchester Bridge, spreading beyond any hope of control.

“The fact is, if you put the lynx into Kielder, they will spread out. It’s not a sealed reservation. We are just gobsmacked that anyone would think they have the right to impose such a problem on our industry, our communities.”

As for the Trust’s various promises of compensation and insurance, Malcolm points back to that urban disdain for the practicalities of sheep production: “We don’t want compensation! We don’t want the problem. We don’t want our sheep taken. What would be their criteria to prove that a sheep was taken by lynx anyway? We’ve already had a lecture about how bad our farming is, so why should we trust them with that decision?”

As we travel up to the forest line, atop an ATV with a trio of dogs in our wake, Malcolm recounts how he became a fairly recent convert to the virtues of Lleyn sheep, having fallen out of love with the Blackfaces that tradition had first led him to.

“We couldn’t get the male Blackie lambs big enough for the market. It was always a problem. Then foot-and-mouth disease gave us a big lesson in biosecurity. After that, I wanted to be self-contained, have something that we can breed ourselves.”

There are now 700 Lleyn and Lleyn cross Texel ewes on Malcolm’s land, alongside 50 pure bred Limousins, and he declares himself a ‘big fan’ of the breed, saying that he is now much more happy with running a commercial sheep business. But our eyes always go back to that fence-line into the forest...

“We simply cannot be asleep at the wheel over this issue. Remember, the industry put off discussion of EID, saying to ourselves that it would never happen, and then one day, it was imposed on us. We cannot let that happen over lynx.

“Remember that Carly Simon song?” he asks, out of the blue. “You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone?”