Our upland peatlands are magnificent, a feast for the senses. These brooding landscapes may appear forbidding and solemn if you experience them in bad weather (as Yorkshire Peat Partnership generally do). Catch them on a sunny day, though, in late spring or early summer when the bubbling call of the curlew – somehow joyous and haunting – is ringing out across the moor; underfoot, a thick, rolling carpet of sphagnum hummocks blankets the ground in shades of green, yellow and red; soft, white heads of cottongrass bob luminously in the gentle breeze; a dragonfly circles a pool, its glittering wings rattling; cranberry, bilberry, crowberry, cloudberry speckle the moss, tiny jewels; overhead, a skylark rises into the sky to parachute back down like a musical shuttlecock; on the horizon, a short-eared owl quarters the ground on elegant, sculling wingbeats.
Back in the mid-noughties however, people started to catch on to both the importance of our blanket bogs and also just how badly damaged they had become. Agricultural policy following World War II had led to drainage in pursuit of agricultural improvement. As water tables dropped bog surfaces dried out, killing off the characteristic flora that makes bogs, bogs. Shorn of its protective vegetation overcoat, upland peat was exposed to the erosive effects of the weather and either washed off into river catchments below or simply billowed away into the atmosphere.
Participants on a conservation course at Swath Moor. (c) Sam Halliday At the same time, there was a gradual pushback against the lifeless-wasteland narrative that had dogged these amazing places since at least Wuthering Heights, and we began to recognise Conan Doyle’s great Grimpen Mire for the fiction it is. Far from being scenes of horror, our peatlands support and nurture us – a safety blanket (bog), if you will.
Upland peatlands store carbon, filter our drinking water, mitigate flooding downstream and provide space for recreation, but we diminish them when we frame them solely in the context of the benefits they afford us. Whatever services our peatlands provide, they are first and foremost homes for wildlife and they are beautiful.
Back in 2008 peatland restoration work was already underway in the Peak District and South and North Pennines. To fill the big northern Yorkshire gap, a consortium of stakeholders funded by Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority and Yorkshire Wildlife Trust commissioned Tim Thom and Astrid Hanlon to scope out the potential for a peatland restoration project. This led to the creation of Yorkshire Peat Partnership in 2009, now hosted and led by Yorkshire Wildlife Trust.
The importance of peatlands and their restoration has risen on the agenda since 2009. Wet habitats like peatlands were singled out in the Trust’s State of Yorkshire’s Nature Report as one of three key habitat types where immediate and dedicated action, including protection and restoration, could have the biggest impact for biodiversity and our native species. For the last 15 years we have been coordinating restoration across the Yorkshire Dales, North York Moors National Park and Nidderdale National Landscape, raising over £36 million. This has enabled us to bring almost 47,000 hectares of peatland into recovery, and as a result will prevent almost 13 million tonnes of carbon emissions by 2050. We could not have achieved this without the support of our funders and partners, and the co-operation and participation of the landowners and managers on whose land we are working.
Fixing Fleet Moss
Fleet Moss near Hawes was one of the most damaged sites when we started. Our initial works here were to block the drainage channels (grips), and then the funding ran out. The site was still patterned with a terrible lacework of gulleys (erosion channels), patches of bare peat and hags (steep banks of bare peat).
Through the EU Life funded Pennine PeatLIFE project, we were able to return in 2018. Coupled with further funding from Defra, the Environment Agency, Garfield Weston Foundation and Yorkshire Water, as well as our Give Peat a Chance appeal in 2019, Fleet Moss has become a (fairly sizeable) microcosm of what we are achieving across North Yorkshire. Flexibility from our funders has given us the freedom to research and innovate; to try out new techniques that we can then take, with a demonstrable track record, to less flexible funders. When I first visited Fleet Moss in 2018, it was like Mad Max with mud; now it is verdant, squelching, shimmering with life.
The path ahead
It is this pioneering spirit that we hope to share with our partners in the Great North Bog, spanning 7,000 sq km of peatlands across the north of England, as well as in our Dragons in the Dales project, which looks at the potential reintroduction of the endangered white-faced darter dragonfly. North Yorkshire is home to 27% of England’s blanket bog, and in time we would like this to be a boggy paradise for all to enjoy – for many years to come.
Find out more at: yppartnership.org.uk
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