‘In Britain, we burn precious peatland for sport’ – article in Prospect magazine about grouse moor burning

The following article written by Tim Smedley was published in Prospect magazine yesterday, which is available to read free online (here) and has been reproduced below:

“To keep this moor viable we have to raise 6,000 grouse a season, which we do by killing everything else that moves,” says Viscount Deveroux, the alter-ego of comedian Henry Morris.

Walking a moor, dressed in tweed and with 12-gauge shotgun in hand, he continues: “Do you know there are people who say that driven grouse shooting is a screamingly elitist anachronism whose main proponents own the majority of our countryside yet have absolutely no interest in our shared natural history? And to those people I would simply say this: why don’t you bugger off and inherit your own 10,000-hectare estate?”

The video was released to coincide with a new consultation [Ed: RPUK blog here] by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on grouse moor management, which closes on 25th May. In particular, the practice of heather burning in England is under scrutiny—because this very British elitist anachronism, to borrow a phrase, has global consequences.

According to Defra, the UK has 13 per cent of the world’s blanket bog, but 80 per cent of its peatland is now degraded. Over the past 200 years, since driven grouse shooting became a gentleman’s pursuit and was popularised by Queen Victoria and Albert, the upland peatlands of England and Scotland have been drained and annually burnt. Grouse prefer to feed on young heather which is more nutritious, and which grows back after each fire.

Peat bogs, however, shouldn’t be dry or dominated by a single shrub. They are England’s largest carbon store, covering about 11 per cent of the country and holding an estimated 584m tonnes of carbon. To put that in perspective, if all that carbon were released it would be more than five times England’s total annual emissions. Advocates for driven grouse hunting claim that their management techniques actively protect that carbon store; opponents such as the conservationist and Springwatch host Chris Packham say such arguments are just hot, smoke-filled air. The Defra consultation is the latest attempt to resolve the argument.

The last such attempt came in a set of 2021 regulations, which prohibited burning on peat more than 40cm deep within Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) in England. It takes around 10 years for each centimetre of peat to form, meaning such depths amount to 400 years’ worth of carbon capture and storage. Worth protecting during a climate crisis, you might think. The 40cm rule was seen as a step forward, but there was scepticism over whether moorland managers would abide by it—and according to the RSPB, they didn’t, with more than 200 illegal burns reported via their Survey123 app suspected of being illegal.

The latest Defra consultation is on its proposal to expand the protection to peat of 30cm depth, and beyond SSSI boundaries. This would mean covering a further 146,000 hectares of habitat—taking the total to 368,000 hectares, equivalent to the size of Greater London, Greater Manchester and the West Midlands combined. “That’s great news for peatland, peatland processes, nature, climate and people,” Patrick Thompson, uplands lead at RSPB, enthuses.

Not everybody is as happy. The grouse shooting community is “up in arms and readying to fight the proposals”, says Thompson, who was raised in the uplands and says the issue “runs through my veins”. Adrian Blackmore, the Countryside Alliance’s director of shooting, claims that, “The possibility of wildfires has grown due to climate change, yet the RSPB is wanting to stop an essential management practice that can help both prevent and reduce their devastating impact.” The British Association for Shooting and Conservation argues that controlled burning in the uplands is “an essential tool” for “improving habitat”. Rather than burn less, they say, we should learn from the United States and Spain and do more controlled burning.

But, counters Thompson, “A healthy bog is already resilient to fire.” Peatlands should be wet even at the surface, and should not just have woody heather growing on them, but also mosses. “It’s only ones that have been drained, dried and annually burned—for the management of driven grouse hunting—that are a wildfire risk.”

Core samples taken of peat bogs show a dominance of heather only emerging in the past 100 years, after driven grouse hunting had become fashionable. A dominance of dry heather becomes a wildfire risk, and so it is burned off to reduce the wildfire risk—it is a circular argument and an endless task.

Each side accuses the other of lacking evidence to back up their position. However, the latest Defra consultation comes with a handy new 322-page Evidence Review by Natural England. It finds that “a large proportion (76-80 per cent) of aboveground carbon stock [is] lost via combustion, followed by gradual re-accumulation over several decades”. As for controlled burning in the US, Spain and elsewhere, there is “limited evidence” that this transfers to “the UK peatland context”. Meanwhile, the 2021 40cm rule didn’t work as hoped, with evidence that SSSI sites and “areas of deep peat have been burned at a similar frequency as other areas”.

One measure the Defra consultation doesn’t include, however, is a total ban on the managed burning of heather; something that Packham, the campaign group Wild Justice and the Raptor Persecution UK website are calling for. The parliament.uk petition to “Ban driven grouse shooting” recently passed the 100,000 signatories mark needed to be considered for a parliamentary debate. It isn’t official RSPB policy, but “if people are not prepared to adhere to the regulations, then the next step is complete legislative control”, says Thompson. “And then there’s no grey areas. It says you can’t do that anymore.”

Grouse moors have been found littered with veterinary medication to boost grouse numbers; their predators or competitors—chiefly raptors and hares—have been indiscriminatingly snared or shot. It is a sport, after all, and these are sports fields which require upkeep. Only, their playing—or rather killing—fields cover half of England’s globally important peatlands. Perhaps it is time to debate in parliament whether this is a recreation activity we still deem necessary and acceptable during a climate crisis.

What of the rural economy? Grouse shooting is believed to contribute £23m a year to small local businesses across Scotland alone—but that figure seems a massive underachievement for what UK Nature Minister Mary Creagh describes as “this country’s Amazon Rainforest… capable of storing as much carbon as all the forests in the UK, France and Germany combined”.

The government has pledged up to £400m for tree planting and peatland restoration as part of its Nature for Climate Fund. Rural jobs would not only remain but grow, in rewetting and restoring peat bogs, fire prevention, even eco-tourism. A survey from the Rewilding Network showed that, in Scotland, full-time equivalent jobs across 13 major rewilding projects (including the Langholm Initiative, which saw the largest ever community buyout of a former grouse estate) rose from just 24 before rewilding to 123, an increase of more than 400 per cent. In England and Wales, jobs across 50 sites increased from 162 to 312 (a rise of 93 per cent). A removal of grouse hunting could trigger a rural jobs boom. 

This isn’t a war on the countryside. It’s the rejuvenation of it.

ENDS

Tim Smedley is an environmental writer and author of books including The Last Drop: Solving the World’s Water Crisis (Picador). He is editor of the New Climate, and writes about climate change and the environment for Prospect.