Years of work to protect our moorland landscape and wildlife go up in smoke

On an inclement day like this when the weather has closed in and leaden skies hang oppressively overhead, it’s hard to imagine a fire starting up here let alone one capable of causing much damage.

But last month, during the warmest and driest April on record, a blaze tore through more than two square miles of protected moorland on Marsden Moor estate in West Yorkshire. The fire, believed to have been caused by a quad biker riding across the moor, left behind a trail of scorched devastation wiping out years of painstaking conservation and restoration work in a matter of hours.

The Marsden Moor estate is owned by the National Trust and although its open moorland can look rather bleak and unforgiving it is a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest that is home to an array of birds, insects, plants and mammals. Gemma Wren, the Trust’s West Yorkshire Countryside Manager, was out on the moors cycling with her husband when the fire started and was among the first to raise the alarm. “It was a really nice day and there were a lot of walkers about so someone could have easily got caught up in it. People don’t realise how fast moorland fires can travel, you would struggle to run away from it,” she says.

The blaze was so bad a specialist helicopter had to be called out, dropping hundreds of gallons of water on to the raging fire, and at one point 10 fire engines were at the scene as firecrews battled to bring the flames under control.

“Most fires start on a warm day when it’s windy and you’re absolutely powerless, all you can do is stand there and watch. You can damp down the edges but you can’t stop it moving, it’s just too dangerous and it really is soul-destroying,” says Gemma.

Fires are a constant hazard on the moors during the spring and summer months. “It tends to be the beginning of the season that you get a lot of fires because you have all the previous year’s vegetation on top and that lights very easily, but once the vegetation starts to green it’s less susceptible to fire. Although obviously if we do get a dry summer then there’s a big risk we’ll get more fires.”

What made the latest blaze particularly damaging was the fact it started on open moorland. “We had a big fire on the estate in 2008 in an area we’d been working on for 25 years and most of that went up in smoke, but because it was fenced off to stop animals grazing it acted as a barrier, but this time there was nothing to stop the fire spreading.”

Even a couple of weeks later some areas were still hot underfoot. “Where the fire gets into the peat beneath it keeps on burning and it’s really difficult to put out. A week after the fires were extinguished there were still a couple of spots that continued smoking so we had to keep going out with garden back-pack sprayers to put them out.”

In the end, around 1,235 acres of moorland were affected by the fire, about a fifth of the overall estate. But less than a month afterwards and up on Close Moss, part of the area affected, what appears to be the green shoots of recovery can already be seen sprouting out amid the clumps of charred earth. However, appearances can be deceptive. “This purple moor grass comes back really quickly after the fires, but the heather and bilberry and the plants that we want grow much more slowly. It will take them years to re-establish themselves and because the grass comes back so fast it chokes all the other stuff out so they don’t grow,” explains Gemma.

“The grass doesn’t support as many insects for the birds up here, it’s not a good nesting site because it’s really dense and they can’t get into it and it’s not good for the sheep because they won’t eat it. This area has become a monoculture and we’re going to need to do a lot of work to get back some of the vegetation we need.”

As well as working to restore areas of damaged land, the National Trust wants to see a clampdown on illegal off-roading. “It’s a big problem, we have loads of off-road motorbikes coming across the moors and churning it up. It causes a lot of erosion and much of the work we do is trying to prevent the erosion and keep the peat where it is.”

The Trust is part of Moor Watch, a group that includes Natural England as well as police and local authorities in Yorkshire and Lancashire, aimed at encouraging people to play their part in helping protect the countryside by reporting anti-social behaviour.

“Not everybody reports incidents on the moors to the police, or knows how to, and because it’s not an area where lots of people live it’s not seen as a big priority. But the fact is most of the moorland around here is protected by legislation and it is important, but if the damage continues then we’re fighting a losing battle. We spend tens of thousands of pounds a year on moorland restoration projects only for motorbikes to come over and trash it,” says Gemma. “We have signs up all over the place telling people that motorbikes shouldn’t be up there but it doesn’t get through to everyone.

“We need to get the message out there that the moor isn’t just a piece of waste land where people can do what they want.”

The estate is a wildlife haven and a designated European special protection area for breeding birds such as merlin, short-eared owls, golden plovers, curlews and twite.

“The twite are the biggest concern because they are rare and we hold around 30 per cent of England’s twite population. That’s only about 20 or 30 breeding pairs so there aren’t many left and one of the nesting areas has definitely gone in this latest fire, so they’re going to struggle.”

It isn’t just birds that suffer when there is a big moorland blaze. The estate is part of a Yorkshire Water catchment area and fires can lead to carbon contaminating the water. “Because the fires have exposed the soil it washes into the treatment plants and they have actually shut off the intakes from here because it’s taking too much through. The dissolved organic carbon goes into the water and this has to be cleared to get the right water quality for us to drink.”

This means future fires could have more of a direct impact on us than we might think. “With more fires comes more minerals entering the water which gives the water companies problems and this, in turn, can mean our water bills go up.”

Much of the Trust’s restoration work at Marsden has focused on blocking man-made gulleys to keep the water on the tops of the moors. “In the past, a lot of the moors were drained to improve grazing and we’re trying to make the moors wet again by raising the water table. This has the benefit of helping the peat retain carbon in the soil rather than releasing it as carbon dioxide.”

It also helps conserve water. “All of our drinking water around here comes from the moors and if we dry them out then we could be facing droughts in the future.

“So looking after the moors isn’t just about habitat for the wildlife, it’s about what they provide for people and the quality of our lives,” says Gemma.

“We don’t want to stop people using the land because that’s why we have open access, but we need them to appreciate what’s there and realise just how important it is.”

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To find out more information about Marsden Moor, or to become a volunteer, call 01484 847 016 or email [email protected]