On Salisbury Plain, a mile or so from the A303 trunk road, there is one farm that grows no subsidised cereal crops.  Despite the cash inducements of the EU Common Agrcultural Policy, the 680 acres at Parsonage Down are still clothed in old grassland, some a remnant of the unimproved pasture that once covered the entire chalk downs. No chemical fertilisers are spread on this ancient grass.  Instead it is fertilised with organic manure and grazed with cattle and sheep in the time-honoured ways of Salisbury Plain.

In spring, when the surrounding wheat crops look bright green, the fields of Parsonage Down appear dull,  for the artificial nitrogen has lent a vivid, unnatural hue to the prairie wheat around them.  But step onto the old downland pasture and you are aware of another, more striking difference, this land is alive.  Chalkland flowers grow in abundance in the dense, herb-rich sward..

As the spring deepens into summer the sounds of this ancient landscape grow louder - grasshoppers, crickets, bees buzzing between the bright chalkland flowers.  Butterflies, like the skipper and the common blue, drift over the short-cropped grasses as skylarks climb on the summer thermals. Chaffinches and willow warblers haunt the gorses and brambles, stone curlews call shrilly in the evening and badgers, hares and foxes play out a drama as old as the earth.

The Neolithic farmer would have recognised this landscape, as Richard Jeffries reflected while dreaming on an ancient burial mound.  

'Summer after summer the blue butterflies had visited the mound, the thyme had flowered, the wind had sighed in the grass " 

Our grandfathers would have known this landscape, too.   For the rural child growing up in southern Britain as recently as the last war,the life and sounds of the chalk grasslands would have been as familiar as the shopping mall to the modern child. This landscape was a part of life's popular experience. The politicians with their limited subsidies have hemmed it in as a museum piece.

Parsonage Down Farm is now a National Nature Reserve, a permanent reminder to future generations of what has been taken from them. That it survives at all is thanks to the care and foresight of the former owner, the late Robert Wales. He had farmed Parsonage Down from the early 1920s, and like most of the chalkland farmers of his time he grazed it with livestock. This was considered the best way to manage these thin, drought-prone soils

The grazing of herb-rich pastures with cattle and sheep is no soft option. It demands the skilled balancing of pasture and livestock so that both will thrive.  Achieving this balance year in, year out, is an art not easily learned.  As his late manager, Bill Elliott used to say: "I am just a dog and stick man carrying on from where my grandfather left off", but his head was full of the intimate knowledge of both the livestock and the living sward on which they all depended.  Robert Wales and his managers applied this prescientific art to his own small part of the countryside. Though it failed to make him rich, it helped him survive the great depression of the 1930s when many farmers were in trouble.

After the war he stuck to his pastoral farming system, even though government subsidies were by then inducing his neighbours to plough up the ancient grasslands and go for richer pickings from cereals.  When he died in 1979. aged ninety-three, the switch to corn-growing was becoming a headlong rush .  European subsidies under Ihe CAP offered an even bigger cash bonanza to farmers who took the prairie option.  Land prices on the Plain soared to a record £ 3,000 an acre as City investors scrambled to buy up farms and get a slice of the action.  Had Parsonage Down been sold on the open market it would almost certainly have made £2.5 million, perhaps more. The centuries-old pasture would have been ploughed up and its wildlife lost.

But Robert Wales had foreseen the danger.  Under the terms of his will the farm, part of which had already been declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), was offered to the Nature Conservancy Council, now Natural England, at the knockdown price of just £0.5 million, barely 20 per cent of its market value.  The deal was authorised bv the then Environment Secretary, Michael Hesseltine, but the Treasury grant only covered the purchase of the SSSI and layby land at Cherry Lodge.  The rest, consisting of low diversity pasture was excluded.   In line with the market philosophy of the new Thatcher government, the Minister insisted the purchase price of non-SSSI parcel had to be repaid to the Treasury within one year. It was at this point that Professor Denis Bellamy, Head of the Zoology Department at the University of Cardiff, entered into a discussion with Michael Hesseltine seeking a way to maintain the farm as an intact enterprise. At that time he was involved in behavioural studies into the question of how sheep divided up an apparently uniform pasture through combinations of their interactions with the environment and other sheep within the flock.  He had a flock of sheep  on the downland of Aston Rowatt NNR and was also studying rabbit grazing on Skomer Island. He had also worked on the Parsonage Down sheep.  The outcome was that the Minister said that it was up to the local NCC region to find the money to purchase the Scotland Lodge land if they wanted it.  However, finding the money would involve the region forgoing the development of its new regional office.  Thus, having acquired Robert Wales' unique working farm for the nation, the NCC felt it was obliged to sell off part of it on the open market. On the morning when contracts were to be exchanged tractors waited in line to put their prize under the plough.