Read this new plea to barbecue users not to light up on Yorkshire moors due to fire risk – Yorkshire Post letters

LIKE many of your readers, I was distressed to read that further warnings have had to be issued by fire chiefs following the illegal use of a barbecue on Saddleworth Moor - just months after the highly destructive blazes on Ilkley Moor and Marsden Moor (Wildfire warning after moorland barbecue spotted – months after blazes on Ilkley Moor, The Yorkshire Post, July 5).

Wildlife warning after moorland barbecue spooted months after blazes on Ilkley Moor

This demonstrates that we cannot just focus on educating members of the public to the dangers of wildfires (as we have done for over 1,400 school pupils at this year’s Let’s Learn Moor event), but that we also need to do as much proactive work as possible to limit the scale and damage of wildfires on moorland.

This includes controlled burning – which firefighters used when battling the 2018 Saddleworth Moor fire.

The Yorkshire Post says: Ilkley Moor fire and our collective duty as custodians of the countryside to reduce the risks of fire

One only needs to look at the huge damage caused by wildfires in California to see what happens when land management is not undertaken correctly and the fuel load for a wildfire is allowed to grow to a shocking degree, at least partly due to over-zealous environmental regulations which limit the removal of dead trees.