Looking after Peat on Grassington Common
“You can tell in certain pockets here how beautiful the bog was. It’s not that long ago that it was a pristine, beautiful active bog with all these special species on it. It wouldn’t take much, and doesn’t have to be really expensive, to make a massive difference.”
Manon Pue measuring the depth of peat on Grassington Moor
Behind Manon Pue, the sky is picture-book blue with white fluffy clouds. We’re sitting on cushions of moss, leaning into a small dip in the ground. We’re warm, the sun is out, the heather is spreading purple across the moor, and we’ve just seen a marsh harrier course across the sky. But the weather isn’t always so fair on Grassington Moor, and if you’re doing a survey, it’s more likely to be raining or snowing. September to March is the best time to survey the condition of the peat. ‘The best conditions,’ laughs Manon, ‘are when you can’t even see a hundred metres in front of you.’
Manon is a Peat Project Officer from Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, which is the lead partner on Yorkshire Peat Partnership (YPP). Made up of more than ten organisations, YPP is working to rewet and restore all of the upland peatland in Yorkshire by 2035. Manon’s survey work is part of this, as it provides a clear idea of where restoration is needed, and the size of the challenge. Grassington Moor alone is 683 hectares. Manon’s work, with the support of a small team who help carry out the surveys, will take her across Yorkshire. Grassington Moor is the first area of common land she has surveyed.
‘We've been asked by the Our Common Cause project to create a plan to look at how the peatlands on Grassington might be restored. Before coming out, we look at aerial photos and identify any erosion features such as grips, gullies, hags and bare peat. When we’re here, we take survey points every 100 metres, and follow a transect line, which joins up those points. At each of the survey points, we take peat depths and we identify the vegetation community, making note of specific indicator species. If we're near any of the features that we've identified on the aerial photos, we have a closer look and take measurements. Specifically with grips and gullies, what the base is made of? Is it vegetated? Is it bare mineral? Is there peat - and if there is peat, how deep is that peat?’
Manon takes all this information back to the office, for the next stage of planning: what could be done in each location, and across the whole site? Manon recently delivered her initial draft plan for Grassington Moor: this will be discussed with graziers, the local gamekeeper (who showed us around the moor earlier today), and other stakeholders. ‘Together we’ll see what practical measures can be started and what the best way of funding that work might be, then we can move on with restoration.’
Beginning a process of healing
Where we’re sitting, it’s clear to see what has happened to the peat. In the 1950s and 1960s farmers across England’s uplands were encouraged to cut ‘grips’. These channels helped to drain the peat, so that the land became drier and would support more grass for grazing animals. At that time, the nation’s drive was to produce food from the hills. Over the years, the numbers of grazing animals on the moors has reduced, but the size of the grips has increased: the peat dries, its unique habitat is damaged, and it releases carbon into the atmosphere, rather than storing it.
We step down into a massive gully whose sides are taller than we are: I’m face to face with a wall of peat that has taken thousands of years to form. When there’s a healthy layer of sphagnum moss just one millimetre of peat forms in a year, so a metre represents a thousand years. Here, the peat has been exposed and seriously harmed in just a matter of decades. Once peat begins to drain, a cycle of degradation has started that impacts the entire peat bog; and the longer parts are left exposed, eroded, and draining, the worse it gets. But with the focus on restoration, this peatland could be at a turning point: human intervention can help it heal.
‘The restoration plan aims to restore the peatland to how it was before any erosion happened,’ Manon tells us. ‘We want to raise the water table back to where it was, and revegetate any bare peat. We can work to raise that water table by using dams and sediment traps in grips and gullies; and we can revegetate using vegetation that's already here.’ Around us the land is certainly not all bare peat. While there are some enormous gullies, there are also great swathes of grasses and spongy wet mosses, and a lot of heather. Restoration work could reprofile the land where there has been erosion, to help the peat hold in water. This in turn would help mosses and cotton grass take hold, so a new cycle of peat creation could begin.
Peat: What is it good for?
Peat is in the news a lot - and much of the focus is on its ability to hold carbon and mitigate further climate change. Along with this, though, comes the fact that a healthy peatland is a home for many, many species of grasses, mosses, insects, moths, butterflies and birds, and even snakes; it’s a precious living system.
Manon is grinning for most of the time we’re together. She loves spreading the word about peat, she tells us, and being in the high moors of Yorkshire is the perfect job for her, combining her love of these wide open spaces with her passion for ecology.
‘Bogs and peatlands have benefits to so many different people, whether they live near to them or not. There’s a full range of species that call these places home, and there are so many specialist species. It's really exciting when you do get to see those. As well as that, there's the filtering of water; so water is cleaner, and carries less sediment, once it reaches rivers and reservoirs. And if you can make the uplands into more of a sponge, which still lets water out but at a gradual rate, that can help to reduce flooding in towns and cities downhill. So yeah, there's a lot of benefits. And that's without even mentioning carbon.’
Spreading the word
Through the Our Common Cause project and a specially designed John Muir Trust Award helping people understand more about upland commons, Manon has been out here with a group of thirty young people who visited from Blackburn. ‘One of the first question that I asked in the session was: Who's heard of peat before? And I think about four or five of them put their hands up, and that was including the adults. But they were really engaged, being out here, right from the start. By the end of the day, when I was talking about the problems that we have and how we try and solve them, they were coming up with their own suggestions!’
On Upland Commons
As Grassington Moor is the first upland common Manon has come to work with, I ask her how this differs from other areas. ‘We work on peatlands all over Yorkshire. There are many that we feel quite privileged to go to, because they are behind locked gates, nobody else gets to go there that much; but in these spaces, there aren’t as many different people to consider. With commons, there's so much more potential for engaging with so many different people, including the graziers and the gamekeeper and others who already know this land. And being on a common is also opening doors for us to engage with groups of people who might not have been to upland peatlands before. Being with the young people a couple of weeks ago really opened my eyes to the opportunities that we might have if we work on more commons in the future, to engage people and inspire them about peatlands about bogs, and ways of being involved with protecting these special places.’
It’s nearly time to walk off the moor but I can’t resist asking Manon the question I always like to ask people: how optimistic is she about the prospect of improving the condition of the moor?
‘I think there is massive potential,’ she says. ‘You can tell in certain pockets here how beautiful the bog was. It's not that long ago that it was a pristine, beautiful active bog with all these special species on it. It wouldn't take much, and doesn't have to be really expensive, to make a massive difference. We got really excited when we saw how deep the peat is and how much diversity there is still here. As long as we're having conversations and listening, listening to each other, and we can keep the momentum going, it could be fantastic.’
More about Yorkshire Peat Partnership here
Manon Pue, standing with a measuring rod, ready for Rob to make a portrait on his large format camera