Gamekeeper v Conservationist perspectives on setting moorlands alight – good article in Sunday Times

The Sunday Times published a pretty good article today, written by Ben Spencer, Science Editor, presenting opposing views (grouse moor gamekeeper vs RSPB Senior Policy Officer for the Uplands) on setting the moorlands alight.

It’s based on the management of two neighbouring moors in the Peak District – one, the Stalybridge Estate managed for grouse shooting, and the other, the RSPB’s Dove Stone Nature Reserve managed for nature conservation.

From a distance, there is little to differentiate the two moors. High on the hills above Oldham, in the western reaches of the Peak District, they sit dark, brooding and imposing, running into each other at an invisible border that jags across the hillside.

Yet these two moors — the private Stalybridge estate, managed by gamekeepers to raise grouse for shooting, and Dove Stone nature reserve, run by the RSPB for the benefit of wildlife — represent two fundamentally different approaches to the countryside.

Deep divides, simmering for years, threaten to spiral into open culture wars as the government proposes new restrictions on the way the uplands are managed.

Next month, officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are expected to confirm new bans on the burning of grass and heather on swathes of English upland. Any area with peat more than 40cm deep will no longer be able to carry out controlled burns, a tool gamekeepers say is vital to manage the risk of wildfires. The new rule will affect 360,000 acres of moorland.

Jono Simmonds, 36, a gamekeeper who manages 3,000 acres of grousemoor at Stalybridge, said: “We’re getting pushed into a corner. It may work in a textbook or an office, but up here, every moor is different.”

On August 12 — the Glorious Twelfth — estates like this across the British uplands will open their shooting season and grouse will start to appear on the menus of high-end restaurants. Stalybridge only runs private shoots, but other estates charge more than £1,000 a person for a day of shooting.

Supporters of the grouse-shooting tradition, which dates to Victorian times, say the entire industry is at risk, escalating the wildfire risk at a time of worsening heatwaves. The National Farmers’ Union says the proposed changes lack evidence and the Moorland Association, which represents grousemoor owners, has accused ministers of being swayed by the “religion” of rewilding.

Simmonds, who manages the estate on behalf of the landowners, a family in the Midlands who have passed the estate down over generations, said: “By doing small, controlled burns in a patchwork, you reduce the fuel load on the ground. If we can’t do that, the wildfire risk becomes unmanageable. It could end up with people who manage thousands and thousands of acres walking away, because they can’t physically manage it.”

The row has exposed the deep gulf between two visions of how to manage the uplands. On the one side are the gamekeepers, who want to see a landscape carefully stewarded, with risks reduced through close management and regular cutting and burning of vegetation. On the other side are the nature charities who would rather see the moorlands returned to their natural state: deep, marshy bog.

Tom Aspinall, 40, senior policy officer for uplands at the RSPB, which has managed Dove Stone since 2011, is convinced there is no need for managed burning. Instead, he thinks peatlands should be “re-wetted”, returned to the state they were in before they were drained for grazing in the 1950s and 1960s. Re-wetting reduces fire risk, stores carbon and increases biodiversity, he said.

That process is well under way on Dove Stone. Whereas Stalybridge is mostly firm and flat underfoot, walking across Dove Stone moor is hard going — boots sink into marshy ground that is sopping wet despite the extraordinarily dry summer conditions.

Crucially, Aspinall pointed out, water does not burn. “We’re not saying all wildfires will be stopped here, but if they hit a wet gully you will at least have a chance to get them into control.”

He said that is exactly what happened in 2018, the year in which the Saddleworth fire — the largest wildfire in living memory — burnt across both moors. The blaze is thought to have been sparked by arsonists on Stalybridge, before spreading east to the wider Saddleworth area, covering seven square miles of moorland. More than 100 soldiers were drafted in to help tackle the fire, which was not fully extinguished for three weeks.

“It was like something out of a Vietnam film,” said Richard Bailey, 54, a gamekeeper who travelled from Buxton in Derbyshire to help tackle the fire. “There was thick smoke, helicopters buzzing around. It went on for days on end.”

It eventually came to a halt in a wet gully on Dove Stone, where firefighters, soldiers and volunteers from across the Peak District brought it under control.

Aspinall is convinced the grousemoor lobby wants to retain managed burning not to control the wildfire risk, as they claim, but to ensure a steady supply of the young heather shoots on which young grouse feed.

Widespread heather, which is rich in oils and abundant on grousemoors, increases the fire risk, he said. “By changing the hydrology, we have heather on the dryer bits but where it is wet we have more diversity,” he said. There is no need to repeatedly burn back the heather because it simply does not grow as well in the soggy terrain.

To retain moisture, channels called “grips”, which were dug into the moors in the postwar drainage blitz, have been blocked up, as have natural gullies. “We have installed 40,000 dams across the site,” said Aspinall. He said wildlife had responded positively to the wetter conditions, with increased numbers of golden plover, curlew and dunlin.

There are other benefits. Peat is an excellent store of carbon. Experts say a foot of the material underground stores as much carbon as a tropical rainforest does above ground. But as soon as peat dries out, it oxidises: stored carbon turns into carbon dioxide and floats into the atmosphere.

On Dove Stone moor work is under way to reverse that. Once the grips and gullies were blocked up with stone and peat, and pools formed above them, sphagnum moss was planted by hand. As the moss grows, the theory goes, only the top part will get light and air. The lower part of the moss, sitting in dark, wet, anaerobic acidic conditions, will in time transform into peat. “That will take a long time — peat accumulates at a rate of about a millimetre a year,” said Aspinall. “But we’re thinking about the ecosystem here. We are putting nature back in control.”

The approach of Aspinall and the RSPB is dismissed by critics as “rewilding”. Aspinall said: “If we hadn’t burnt, drained, overgrazed and had industrial pollution in these landscapes, then they would have continued to be rich, sphagnum-dominated bogs. And we’re just trying to undo the damage that’s been done over the last few centuries. So if that’s what people call rewilding, then fine. But restoring hydrology is the number one thing we can do to manage fire risk.”

Just a few miles away, on Stalybridge moor, Simmonds was discussing his plans for the shooting season. Unlike other parts of the country, this moor will wait until later in the season, giving the grouse a chance to mature and grow. “We may have a small day of shooting later on,” he said. “But it’s not what you might think. Last year we got 18 and a half brace — that’s 37 birds.” Grouse are traditionally counted in “brace” — two birds. “We might have another day like that. We go out and check the stock and if there’s an excess we might have a small day. But at the moment the numbers are small.”

As for the fire risk, he said he was not opposed to re-wetting — and was open to trying to pursue it on the damper parts of his estate, with deeper peat stores. “There’s a place for burning, there’s a place for cutting, there’s a place for re-wetting,” Simmonds said. “But if you leave us without these tools, somewhere, at some point, there will be another fire like Saddleworth.”

ENDS

Here’s an excellent short video from the RSPB featuring Tom Aspinall discussing the rewetting work undertaken on the Dove Stone Reserve to benefit an important local population of Dunlin. Well worth two minutes of your time.