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Something has shifted this summer, and it should not be allowed to pass quietly. For the best part of a decade, the organisations holding the largest share of Britain's upland conservation estate told the country that wildfire was a problem of weather, arsonists and disposable barbecues. Land management, they said, had nothing to do with it. Those who argued otherwise were dismissed as self-interested, and worse. Now look at what they are saying. Natural England's regional di

On 14 August the Government sent an emergency alert to every phone in the country warning of extreme wildfire risk. Four days later, the Peak District National Park Authority's website carries a notice that access land in the White Peak is closed because the fire severity level is exceptional. The Dark Peak, where every major fire of this summer has burned, remains open. Anyone who has walked the Peak will see the problem at once. The White Peak is the limestone plateau in th

For years, activist groups have lectured the moorland communities about fire. Controlled burning, they claim, is vandalism. The uplands, they tell anyone who will listen, must be protected from those who actually live and work on them. This week, many of those same activists pitched tents on a moor in the Peak District, in August, during one of the driest summers on record, with wildfires already burning elsewhere in the National Park. Earth First!, the self-described radica

The RSPB's explainer of 5 August names one cause, climate change, and finds no fault in the policies it has spent a decade forcing on everybody else. Its own reserves burned this summer. The men who turned out to help are not mentioned once. Everything in the article rests on a single sentence: that the rise in wildfire is driven by climate change "rather than the presence or absence of specific management practices such as controlled burning". No citation is offered. Not a s

United Utilities marked International Bog Day with a post about peatland: a serious statistic, a long list of thanks, and an appeal to the public to behave themselves on the moor. The statistic is the problem. Around 924 hectares across Tintwistle Moor, Dovestone and Macclesfield Forest have been affected by this summer's wildfires — more than 1,300 football pitches, as the company puts it. Set that against the 3,000 hectares it says it has restored in five years and one summ

On Tuesday, a farmer in Rutland stopped his tractor in the middle of harvest to take a call from BBC Radio 4. In under four minutes, speaking to Winifred Robinson on You and Yours, he set out a clearer account of wildfire prevention than anything government has managed to publish this summer. Monty Andrews has been farming for more than sixty years. He was not representing a campaign group. He had no press line to deliver and no funding to protect. He simply described what he

New guidance to moorland managers on requesting temporary access restrictions during exceptional wildfire conditions contains an uncomfortable revelation. Ask four National Park Authorities the same question about fire prevention and you get four different answers, ranging from a direction ready to activate to a general enquiries inbox. In the middle of the hottest summer on record, that is not good enough. Guidance has been issued to moorland managers setting out how to requ

Over the past fortnight, Britain has watched its uplands burn. A wildfire that began near Manchester spread across the Peak District, sending thick smoke over Glossop, Snake Pass, Woodhead and Dove Stone, while a major blaze tore through the Cairngorms, forcing the evacuation of homes, businesses, campsites and the Cairngorm Mountain Resort. At one point around 19 wildfires were burning across England and Wales at the same time. This was not a freak event. It was a warning, a

As firefighters spend another night on the hill at Ryvoan Bothy, as families are turned out of their homes in Glenmore with minutes to grab their belongings, as three and a half kilometres of the Cairngorms goes up in smoke, the two largest wildfires burning in Britain right now are on RSPB ground. Not grouse moors. Not the land that the RSPB has spent a decade telling the public is badly managed. Its own. That is not bad luck. That is not the weather. That is a direct and en

Nearly three weeks. That is how long firefighters have now been fighting the wildfire on Tintwistle Moor above Glossop, and on Sunday Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service declared it a major incident. The blaze, which began on 24 June, has torn through around 260 hectares of moorland and woodland, and crews were called back to the scene in the early hours of Monday morning as high winds drove the fire on once again. Let that timeline sink in. This fire started in June, during t

As dawn broke over the Peak District this morning, gamekeepers who had spent the entire night on Tintwistle Moor were still there, beating back flames alongside exhausted fire crews. They were not on the clock. No public body was invoicing anyone for their hours. They turned out, as they always do, because they know this ground better than anyone alive and because watching it burn is unbearable to the people who spend every other day of the year looking after it. Overnight, D

The RSPB has bought Gallt-y-bere, a stretch of upland in North Carmarthenshire, and it wants a pat on the back for it. The purchase is being trailed as a chance to reconnect a fragmented reserve, restore Celtic rainforest, and — in the words of RSPB site manager Jonathan Cryer — "create the conditions needed for rare wildlife such as hen harrier to flourish in the future." Flourish. Lovely word. Now answer the question the RSPB has dodged for the best part of a decade: how ma

Wildfires are terrible things. People who see them on television, or as plumes of smoke on a distant hillside, think they can imagine what they are like, but they almost certainly can't. To understand the full horror you have to be up close, or worst of all, fighting it in the eye of the storm. The heat, the smell, the danger and the destruction can be traumatising. The focus is understandably on the loss of thousands of tonnes of ancient and irreplaceable peat, but with a su

Any one who has been to Geltsdale recently will have seen the materials describing their ponies as a conservation success story. Having taken over what it describes as a former grouse moor and sheep farm, the charity explains that it reduced sheep grazing and switched to cattle and ponies, which "graze in a different way to sheep, helping to create a more varied mix of ground vegetation". Elsewhere on the reserve, it tells us, ponies are put to work reducing bracken cover to

The Crowden and Arnfield wildfire isn't over. It's gone underground. Containment has been declared, the fire reported out, helicopters stood down and access to the site denied — but the messaging has been conflicting, and it doesn't match what's on the ground. The press are calling what's left "hotspotting." Let's not muddle the language: these are peat soils burning deep underground, undoing centuries of carbon capture, the classic signature of a summer wildfire left to smou

There is a grimly predictable rhythm to moorland fires now. First the smoke, then the helicopters, then the statements about resilience and recovery. And finally, almost as reliably, the gates close and the public are told to keep away. That is exactly what has happened on Crowden and Arnfield Moor. A wildfire broke out on the night of Wednesday 24 June, reportedly started by a camper, tearing across the unmanaged upland above the Longdendale valley. Crews from two fire and r

Some warnings arrive too late to be heeded. Others are ignored in real time. On Tuesday 23 June, Parliament delivered one of the clearest warnings the upland community has heard spoken aloud in years. Giving evidence to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, Natural England's Chief Scientist faced a verdict from the Committee Chair, Alistair Carmichael, that cut to the heart of a decade of failed moorland policy: "You haven't taken people in the upland community w

There are moments in a select committee hearing when years of frustration are distilled into a single sentence. On Tuesday 23 June, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee gave the upland community one of those moments. Turning to Professor Sallie Bailey, Chief Scientist at Natural England, Committee Chair Alistair Carmichael delivered a verdict that gamekeepers, farmers and moorland managers across England have been waiting to hear spoken aloud in Parliament: "You

This week the Yorkshire Post carried a warning that ought to concern anyone who walks, works or lives in the uplands. Tick numbers are soaring, and with them the threat of Lyme disease. Moorland groups across the North have reported chicks carrying a heavy tick burden, dogs returning from unmanaged ground covered in them, and a disease season that no longer ends when the weather turns. The UK Health Security Agency records around 1,500 laboratory-confirmed cases of Lyme disea

The death of Percy, a four-year-old golden eagle found fatally injured on a Borders estate in April, was a sad moment for everyone who has followed the painstaking work to return these birds to the skies of southern Scotland. But the story of his final hours tells us something that the RSPB seems determined never to acknowledge: when a bird of prey was in trouble, it was gamekeepers who stepped in to help. Percy was not the victim of any wrongdoing. An investigation by Scotla