How the brute Black Hill turned a little greener

Many Yorkshire folk know Black Hill by sight, even if most of them usually think of it as Holme Moss.

That's the name given to the road which winds over from Huddersfield and Holmfirth to the Woodhead Pass. Holme Moss is also familiar to everyone who listens to traffic reports, being one of the first routes in northern England to become impassable because of snow.

Rising to the west of the road and the radio mast, Black Hill eventually reaches more than 1,900 feet and until boundaries were changed in the 1970s, it used to be the highest point in Cheshire.

It is the most northerly of the three great gritstone and peat fells of the Peak District National Park – the others being Kinder and Bleaklow – and it also carries what was once the most notoriously difficult stretch of the 270-mile Pennine Way.

The author Alfred Wainwright described Black Hill as "a brute in any weather" and advised walkers to be prepared for a tough and gruelling trek.

"Nothing can grow in this acid waste," he wrote. "There is no root-hold in this sea of ooze. In the flutings and ripplings of the surface of the dunes caused by the action of rain and wind, a certain strange beauty, a patterned sculpturing beyond the skill of man, must, however, be conceded. But it is a frightening place in bad weather, a dangerous place after heavy rain. It is not a place to visit unaccompanied."

Wainwright's views of the fell were published in his Pennine Way Companion of 1968, but today he would not recognise the place.

Black Hill has been at the heart of a five-year restoration programme carried out by Yorkshire Water – which owns the land – overseen by the Heritage Lottery-funded Moors for the Future partnership.

Now, acres of exposed peat have been stabilised with geo-textile grids, while traditional moorland plants and shrubs like ling, bilberry, cloudberry and cotton grass have been planted in order to "green" the once black areas of peat. Gritstone paving slabs now provide an easy path for walkers from one side of the fell to the other.

The main erosion problems were caused by two centuries of industrial pollution eating away the vegetation, plus a series of wildfires over the same period. After heavy rain, the peat washed away, and during droughts it desiccated and was blown off the fell. The resulting exposure of the peat was exacerbated by man-made drainage "grips" which were part of the post-Second World War effort to increase food production and improve the moors for sheep grazing, while the introduction of the Pennine Way in 1965 eventually produced a 100-foot-wide track squelched over by thousands of walking boots each year.

Bruce Wilkinson, who is the project manager supervising the work on behalf of Moors for the Future, says that the best way to describe what had happened to Black Hill is to think of it as a chocolate cake with a hard iced topping. "The outer skin of soil and vegetation basically held everything together. Once you lose the top inch or two that supports the grasses, the whole thing disappears quite quickly through rainfall and the freezing and thawing of ice in winter."

When peat is exposed it has the consistency and appearance of wet chocolate sponge, impossible to walk on, which is why Wainwright had such vividly uncomfortable memories of Black Hill.

Mike Pearson, who leads the team which manages the 75,000 acres owned by Yorkshire Water, says the restoration project is part of an obligations to improve the condition of vast areas of moorland which have been designated as Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). These are the country's very best wildlife and geological sites. They include some of our most spectacular and beautiful habitats, including remote uplands moorland and peat bog.

Yorkshire Water has almost 30,000 acres thus designated and the work is costing it about 1m.

Back in 2003, the company was shocked to find that only nine per cent of its SSSI land was thought to be in good condition for nature, and has been striving to improve areas like Black Hill.

"We chose to see it as a challenge," says Mike. "There is a requirement for us to bring 95 per cent of the SSSIs up to target condition by the end of this year, and as an environmentally-minded public company we see it as our duty to try and achieve that."

Future work will involve the restoration of large areas of sphagnum moss. Moors for the Future's Bruce Wilkinson says that so natural does

the summit of Black Hill look today that people ask him what work has

been done.

"We have basically rebuilt a completely dead ecosystem. When I look at it now I slightly feel like a cultural vandal, after all the things that have been written about the fell by people like Wainwright.

"It really was a black hill. But we've greened it over. Perhaps it should be renamed Green Hill," he says.