What Lies Beneath the Boots

Head up onto a high plateau on a wet day — Kinder, Bleaklow, the Flow Country, the moors above Drumochter — and you are walking across a landscape built by moss. Peat is plant material that never fully rotted, laid down in waterlogged, oxygen-starved conditions at roughly a millimetre a year. A metre of peat can represent a thousand years of growth, and some British bogs run three or four metres deep.

Together, UK peat soils cover something like three million hectares — around a tenth of the land surface — and hold several billion tonnes of carbon. That is a far bigger store than all our woodlands put together. A healthy bog is also a slow, patient carbon sink, and a huge natural sponge. A damaged one does the opposite: it leaks carbon, sheds water fast, and turns the colour of strong tea.

How the Bogs Were Broken

Most upland peat is degraded, and the causes are cumulative rather than dramatic. The usual suspects:

• Drainage grips — parallel ditches cut across moors in the mid-twentieth century to "improve" grazing. They drop the water table by tens of centimetres and dry the peat out.
• Burning and cutting regimes — repeated burning for game management can leave exposed peat and shift the vegetation away from mosses towards tough grasses and heather.
• Overgrazing and trampling — heavy stocking and, in places, too many feet on the same line across a fragile plateau.
• Atmospheric pollution — decades of sulphur and nitrogen deposition knocked back the Sphagnum mosses that build peat in the first place.
• Erosion — once bare peat is exposed, wind and rain cut gullies, and the lost carbon goes down the streams and into the atmosphere.

The result is a self-reinforcing problem. Dry peat kills moss, bare peat erodes, eroding peat sheds water faster, and the bog gets drier still.

Putting the Water Back

Restoration is unglamorous, practical work, and it usually follows a predictable sequence. First, stop the bleeding: block the grips and gullies with peat turves, timber, stone or heather bales so water sits on the moor instead of racing off it. On severely eroded sites, bare peat gets stabilised with coir matting, grass seed and lime, then inoculated with Sphagnum fragments — sometimes as a slurry sprayed from a helicopter on the biggest plateaus.

Then comes the long management phase: reducing grazing pressure, moving from burning to cutting where burning still happens, removing self-seeded conifers that suck up water, and keeping walkers on defined lines. A restored bog is not a finished object. It is a system you nudge, then leave alone for twenty years.

Scale matters too. A single blocked gully does little. Restoration works when it covers whole catchments — hundreds or thousands of hectares at a time — so the water table can rise across the whole plateau.

Carbon, Colour and Flood Peaks

The carbon argument gets the headlines, but the water argument is often what pays for the work. When a bog is rewetted, three things happen at once.

• Carbon losses slow sharply. Rewetting does not instantly turn a bog back into a sink, but it can cut emissions dramatically within a few years. Genuine accumulation takes decades.
• Water quality improves. Eroding peat releases dissolved organic carbon, which stains reservoirs brown and costs a great deal to treat. Fewer gullies mean clearer water.
• Runoff is slowed. A rewetted bog behaves like a sponge, releasing storm water over days rather than hours. It will never stop a major flood, but it can shave the peak off the smaller events that swamp upland villages.

This is why water companies, national park authorities and upland estates increasingly fund restoration together. It is cheaper to fix the catchment than the treatment works.

The Wildlife That Follows

Get the hydrology right and the ecology tends to come with it. Returned wetness brings back hare's-tail cottongrass, cloudberry, bog rosemary and the sundews — small carnivorous plants that do well in nutrient-poor, soggy ground. Fungi and invertebrates follow, and so do the birds.

Upland waders are the best indicators: dunlin, golden plover, curlew and snipe all nest on wet, insect-rich bog. Add merlin, short-eared owl, common lizard and mountain hare, and you have a fairly complete picture of what a functioning upland looks like. Bare, drained, over-burned moor supports a fraction of that list.

Walking Lightly on Deep Peat

Hillwalkers are not the main cause of peat erosion, but we are not blameless either, and the fixes are simple.

• Stay on the path — especially on plateau edges and in wet flushes. A boot print in bare peat can become a gully in a decade.
• Use the flagstones — and don't walk on the grass beside them, which widens the scar you came to avoid.
• Keep dogs close in spring. Ground-nesting season runs roughly March to July; a ranging dog can clear a whole hillside of curlew and plover.
• Never light a fire on peat. It can smoulder underground for days and resurface well away from where you stood.
• Camp on firm, gravelly ground in the uplands, not on deep bog, and leave no trace of a pitch.
• Clean your boots and paws between hills to avoid moving seeds and spores around.

If you want to do more, volunteer with a conservation charity or a national park path team, or report bad erosion, illegal drainage or fly-tipping to the relevant authority. Restoration is slow, expensive and utterly worth it — and the walkers who notice the difference, decade on decade, are often the people who make the case for it.