IN August with the guarantee of sunshine (I live in hope!) Craven’s moorlands become the focus of visitor activity, whether it be walks through stunning purple heather, grouse shoots from the Twelfth , playing in streams or the end of the bilberry harvest, many enjoy the outdoors.

I am sure that all of you have a favourite moor and can picture the wonderful variety of habitats found there including purple clad heath, wet tussocky moor grass and the acid green, ochre and rusty reds of sphagnum covered peat bogs. Each habitat has its own unique ecology but additionally each is valued or viewed differently depending upon the interests and experience of the visitor.

Many people regard the vast grassy moors that make up the majority of moorland in the South Pennines as bleak, featureless and even frightening; but to me, growing up near Rochdale, the moors always remind me of home and a childhood spent adventuring. For many of my students studying agriculture and game keeping, the moors represent potential employment and a managed economic resource, while to conservationists they are viewed as a degraded but valuable environment that needs restoring. Whatever their viewpoint all are passionate about our precious moorlands.

Gaining access to moorland has long been a source of contention between landowners and visitors. My father growing up near Oldham in the fifties tells tales of hurriedly packing tents at 5am and running to avoid gun carrying water bailiffs and game keepers. In the 1930s there was a growing and deep seated belief that the countryside should be open to all and this led to many mass moorland trespasses.

The most famous of these was the Kinder mass trespass in 1932 which, according to Lord Roy Hattersley, was "the most successful direct action in British history" and led, in part, to the formation of the National Parks. Since then a continued belief in the “right to roam” culminated in 2000 with the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (CROW).

The introduction of the CROW Act was opposed by many landowners with fears of unruly hoards arriving on mass from the surrounding cities and trampling all over the moors. In reality the numbers of visitors has not changed dramatically and the majority still walk on existing public rights of way.

To many of those roaming over the moors they perceive a wild and natural landscape but this is far from reality. Moorlands are a highly managed landscape and their appearance reflects political and economic management decisions. In the 1960s and 70s moorlands were seen as unproductive and landowners were paid to dig drains known as grips so that the land could support sheep and forestry. This policy resulted in over 1.5 million hectares of upland peat bogs being drained nationally.

Unfortunately when peat is drained it loses its Sphagnum cover and quickly erodes. This leads to an increase in flash flooding, the leaching of discoloured water into watercourses and the loss of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere adding to global warming. In many areas the dried out peatlands have left a landscape scarred with deep black peat hags and gullies. Not only are we losing peat but it is now realised that sphagnum growth can actively take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store the carbon in the peat. It is estimated that UK peatlands store over 3,200 million tonnes of carbon which is approximately twenty times that stored in UK forests.

With this in mind landowners are again being paid but this time to restore degraded peatland and block the (now very eroded) grips that they were paid to create 40 years ago!

If you were driving along the A59 last winter you might have seen the diggers and helicopters working to restore blanket bog near Blubberhouses. Over the last six years, the Yorkshire Peat Partnership has worked with landowners to restore 23,000ha of peatland at a cost of £10million by blocking grips, re-profiling eroded gullies and hags and re-vegetating bare peat with heather and Sphagnum.

The work, managed by Yorkshire Wildlife Trust has been funded through EU farm environment payments, grants from the Yorkshire Dales National Park, Yorkshire Water (keen to remove eroding peat from our drinking water), the Environment Agency, Natural England and individual landowners.

A real partnership effort that will save Yorkshire’s peatlands for the enjoyment of generations to come!