Environmental groups are counting the cost of a massive EEC and government-promoted farm road building programme on Welsh hillsides and their bird life. The roads are intended to give farmers better access to hill pasture, and allow them to reseed previously inaccessible areas.
The incentive behind the programme is the sheep headage payment - a crude form of reward to farmers, paid according to the number of sheep they put on to the hillsides. There are no official figures on the number of roads, or their total length, since the grant system was introduced in 1980, and the true picture will probably not be known until the present Ordnance Survey maps are updated.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds says the consequences for bird life are severe. Upland roads, it says, are being built throughout less accessible areas - most of Scotland, the Pennines, the Lake District, Northern Ireland, Wales, Bodmin Moor, Dartmoor and Exmoor. But it says the problem is acute in mid-Wales where improvement and access to moorland as high as 2,000 feet above sea-level is bringing close to extinction such rare and declining upland species as red grouse, merlin, golden plover and dunlin - birds which can only survive on unimproved moorland.
The roads lead from farms or existing roads through previously undeveloped hillsides to the high plateaux. The habitat through which they pass is the ffridd, an area of natural riches, containing tracts of bracken and bilberry and a tapestry of flowers.
The ffridd is a feeding and breeding habitat for insectivorous birds - the redstart, whinchat and ring ousel - and the merlin, of which there are fewer than 50 pairs left in Wales.
Until recently most of the ffridd was inaccessible and untouched: now farmers are taming slopes as steep as 45 degrees and planting an alien mix of rye grass and clover.
Above Llandinam new Newtown, Powys, five new roads fan out up a valley less than half a mile wide, and 10 separate farm roads lead to one hilltop, less than two miles across near Llanbrynmair, 14 miles northwest of Newtown. Above Fynyddog, a former grouse moor has been ploughed up and turned over to rye grass. This means sheep can feed throughout the winter, but completely eliminates the moor's value to birds.
Conservationists are alarmed by the suddenness of the transformation of the mid-Welsh hills. The RSPB's Wales officer, Roger Lovegrove, says: "I recently visited a tranquil little valley I had known for 20 years to find a 14-foot wide road had been pressed on to its steep side with its rubble foundation spilling 60 yards down the slope."
There is no control over the design and route of the roads, which are built of rock or hard core and are a minimum of four metres wide.
Because of the grant system's confidentiality the government's Agricultural Development and Advisory Service, which administers the aid, cannot even confirm whether or not an individual road scheme has been given a grant. "All I can say is, grant is available," says an ADAS spokesman.
Last December the Government halved the grant payable for road building to 20 per cent in the less favoured areas - which covers about 80 per cent of Wales - in cases where the farmer makes the road and claims later.
Roger Lovegrove says roads were still being built despite the reduction in grant. "We don't deny farmers their right to a living but we are opposed to a system of subsidy which supports land improvement which is to the detriment of a substantial proportion of the population."
A spokesman for Powys County Council says depopulation is a major worry in mid-Wales. "Farm roads enable farmers to carry on healthy enterprises in the most unlikely places. Farmers are under threat in so many ways. Don't blame them: they have to fight for survival on their factory floor."
The Ministry of Agriculture is to carry out a thorough review of hill livestock headage payments later this year and is believed to be taking conservation into account for the first time.
Andy Wilson of the RSPB's conservation planning unit says the Government could prevent further damage to the mid-Wales upland ecology by making headage payments less attractive. Although the EEC is responsible for the sheep regime throughout Europe, the British government has the power to make whatever headage payments it likes, he says. "If we want to stop an area becoming overgrazed, to the detriment of some of our most important habitat, then we can do it."
