The battle to save Britain's bogs
Peat extraction is killing a unique British habitat
Copyright 2000 The Times (London)
November 25, 2000
By Anne Gatti
TO most people in Britain, a peat bog is as alien as a tropical rainforest. Put aside all thoughts of our patchwork landscape of fields, hedges, streams and heaths and think wilderness.
More specifically, think vast skies above expanses of hummocky grasses, mosses, sedges and heathers and the glint of dark peat-stained pools where you can walk all day and not meet another soul.
Some people find this solitude fearsome. The naturalist Richard Mabey experienced "waves of inexplicable anxiety" the first time he strode across the rain-drenched bog of the Flow Country in northern Scotland. But submit to the wildness and you begin to see what David Bellamy, the president of Plantlife, means when he calls peat bog the jewel of Britain's habitats.
You walk with a spring in your step - the peat underfoot is nine-tenths water - to the tireless song of a hovering skylark, on an undulating carpet of greens shot through with the red, pink, burnished gold and orange, yellow and white flowers that thrive here.
As you leap from hummock to hummock over a watery dip you may disturb a resting snipe which explodes noisily into the air. You skirt a large patch of electric-green moss - the sign of a treacherous spot, deep enough to drown a person - and glimpse the lace-work wings of a large darter dragonfly as it hovers hunting for insects.
Many bog creatures are more coy: the hundreds of insect species in the pools and on the plants, the well-camouflaged birds, like the golden plover, that nest in tussocks, and the ground-hugging plants like bog pimpernel and the round-leaved sundew, one of several carnivorous plants that get their nutrients from the insects they trap in their sticky leaves. You make new acquaintances each time you visit the bog.
This habitat is precious in the same way tropical rainforests are: it is bio-diverse; it has a beneficial effect on the wider environment; many of its plants and animals are unique; and it is endangered.
David Bellamy, a leading voice in the Peatlands Campaign Consortium - a group of conservation bodies fighting to preserve our peat bogs - is appalled at our lack of concern.
"We criticise people from desperately poor Third World countries for not conserving their rainforests," he says, "but when it comes to our bogs, which are actually a rarer habitat than the tropical rainforest, we are doing a much worse job."
We have two types of bog in the UK: blanket bog, which forms a covering up to two metres deep in rainy upland areas; and raised bog, which forms a dome of peat up to ten metres deep, mainly in lowland plains and valleys.
In the past century, we have lost 90 per cent of our blanket bogs and 94 per cent of raised bogs to agriculture, forestry, landfill and peat extraction for horticulture.
A staggering 2.55 million cubic metres are used by gardeners and horticulturists, about a third of which comes from UK sites. With 85 per cent of the UK's commercial extraction taking place in or next to bogs which have SSSI (Sites of Special Scientific Interest) status, there is an urgent need for proper protection.
In the UK there is less than 9,500 acres (equivalent to about four of England's grain-belt farms) of "near natural" raised bog. English Nature thinks it unlikely that there are any raised bogs in England that have not been damaged by human activities.
In Europe as a whole, raised bog is so scarce that the EU has declared it a priority habitat for international conservation. As a result, 30 raised bogs in the UK have been put forward for Special Areas of Conservation (SAC) status, a move the Peatlands Campaign Consortium hopes will stop commercial extraction.
A visit to Thorne and Hatfield Moors - two adjacent areas in south Yorkshire which comprise one of the key lowland raised bogs in line for SAC protection - shows how pressing the need for action is.
Flanked by power-station chimneys to the north and colliery towers to the west, the flat moors, now mainly owned by English Nature, form Britain's largest lowland raised bog.
Humans have long made use of this wetland, digging modest amounts of peat by hand to burn at home, grazing cattle or gathering cranberries. During the 19th century, drains were dug so that peat could be taken out and sold as litter for livestock. This method of extraction allowed the bog vegetation to re establish itself in time.
However, in the 1960s, Fisons, which had acquired extraction rights on parts of the moors, introduced mechanised cutting. This involved stripping the surface off a vast area of the bog, layer by layer, year after year. The radical drainage required to get the machines in and out had a disastrous effect: the water table dropped, the bog plants dried out and scrub plants invaded.
Some parts of Thorne and Hatfield have already been stripped bare. You stand on a track and look down on an apocalyptic scene. All that remains of a living carpet of bog plants is acres of unnaturally flat, black desolation. No skylarks here; only the powerful pumps draining the bog nearby, where huge machines wait to scrape and cut.
This is what makes English Nature's job so difficult. It wants to regenerate the bog but that requires a high water table. Bog forms when layers of waterlogged plants become compacted (lack of oxygen ensures that they don't fully decompose) to form peat. But the extractors - in this case the UK's biggest operator, US multinational Scotts - are constantly drawing water away from the areas English Nature is trying to restore. And no water means no bog.
Kevin Bull, English Nature's site manager for the two moors, earned holiday money working for Fisons as a teenager. He is keenly aware of the bog's role as a unique storehouse, too - a carbon store, a hydrological store and an archaeological store. Because of the anaerobic conditions, things that fall in to a bog -- including materials such as human hair and clothing that rarely survive elsewhere - are preserved for millennia.
In the 1970s a rare Bronze Age wooden trackway was unearthed, pinpointing the time when the ground was becoming too boggy for the local people to get across safely.
In the middle of Thorne is the wreck of a Lancaster bomber that crashed with four crew members on board during the Second World War. The bog became their graveyard. When the water level drops, Bull can see the rear of the plane, jutting out of the bog.
From pollens and plant remains trapped in the layers of peat at Thorne, archaeologists have worked out what the climate and vegetation was over a 4,000-year period.
"Every millimetre of surface peat that's stripped off is a year of archive knowledge gone," Bull says with feeling.
And Scotts is taking, on average, 10 to 20cm each year. The Peatland Campaign Consortium says that to conserve this archive and its flora and fauna, extraction must cease and gardeners must change to peat-free alternatives.
"It is time the multinationals like Scotts became responsible to the wider community," says Craig Bennett of Friends of the Earth. "They have been damaging precious wildlife sites and ignoring local concerns for too long."
A spokesman for the company said: "Scotts wholly refutes the claim that it is damaging valuable wildife habitats. In fact with its restoration and regeneration work it is are actually extending peatland areas that will have a future in conservation."
At Thorne, the community has fought to protect their bog, spending months in the 1970s damming drains excavated by Fisons. This area is now the centrepiece of English Nature's National Nature Reserve. If extraction can be halted now, a mosaic habitat with pockets of raised bog, scrub and fen, is a real possibility.
Already one area of Thorne gives Bull hope for the future: a 200-acre expanse which has not been cut for over 70 years. Although edged with bracken and birch, this is the real thing: a patchwork of sphagnum mosses and cottongrass, with purple heathers crowning the higher ground. At our feet is a clump of vermilion sundews, above it a late darter is still on the wing.
"I know this mayn't be everyone's cup of tea," says Bull, "but when I see this it makes me very happy. I know we are doing something right."