Why are there Highland cattle at Wicken Fen?
The Wicken Vision is an exciting, landscape-scale 100-year plan to extend Wicken Fen by over 1000% to create a large nature reserve for wildlife and people. The long-term aim is for the soil and water conditions to primarily determine the habitats, with free-ranging large herbivores adding variety to the habitats and to be a sustainable management tool for developing this dynamic landscape. The large grazing animals need to be fit for this purpose. The Highland cattle we have are ideally suited. The original nine cattle came from a farm on Mull where they ranged widely to find their food and lived outside all the time. Thus they are hardy and capable of living outside all year at Wicken Fen and they are doing so well at Wicken that every mature female produced a calf in 2006 and 2007. In the past, there would have been lots of hardy cattle in the fenland area, as part of the local farming economy, before the major shift towards arable crops that followed the improved drainage of the fe
