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Three more fires on the Marsden and Saddleworth moors yesterday. Three more incidents that could have been prevented. Three more times that gamekeepers, the people our policymakers would rather sideline, stood in the breach alongside West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Services and got the job done. The scene will be a familiar one. Flames tearing across molinia-dominated moorland, rank and dry and dense after years of under-management, with no effective fue

Late last night, a wildfire broke out on Wessenden Head Moor, the stretch of high ground locals know as Goodbent. As was reported by the Peak District Moorland Group earlier today, the estate gamekeeper and his team were among the first on the scene, working alongside West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service as crews from Todmorden brought specialist equipment to bear on a fire that had every advantage over the people fighting it. Steep terrain, strong winds and a hillside ca

On Monday evening, a wildfire tore across Howden Moor in the Dark Peak, on land owned by the National Trust. This has happened many times before and it will likely happen many times again.. What makes this incident remarkable is not its scale but its timing and its ending. After a wet winter and elevated water tables, fewer than seven days of drier conditions and strong winds were enough to prime the surface vegetation to burn. The fire spread rapidly through areas of longer

The news from Rathlin Island deserves genuine celebration. After a 74% decline in puffin numbers since 1999, the completion of the LIFE Raft project, which has eradicated feral ferrets from Northern Ireland's largest seabird colony, is a great conservation achievement. The return of Manx shearwaters to breed for the first time in two decades is the kind of result that makes the effort worthwhile. Nobody serious disputes that. But conservation achievements do not exist in a va

As anyone who has spent time on a managed grouse moor in the spring can attest to,the curlew's call is one of the most evocative sounds in the British uplands. A haunting, bubbling cry that has defined the moorland landscape for generations. Close your eyes on a Yorkshire moor in spring and it is possible, just briefly, to believe that little has changed. That the countryside remains as it was. That the birds are doing fine. They are not. And that illusion, where it still exi

Earlier this week we published an article into Friends of the Dales and the question of who is really driving its "Eyes on the Skies" campaign. We documented, in detail, how a small Yorkshire charity with a pleasant-sounding mission appeared to be functioning as a public-facing vehicle for a coordinated national lobbying operation that relied on RSPB evidence, RSPB speakers, and RSPB political objectives, while presenting itself to the public and the Charity Commission as in

Bodmin Moor has been on fire. A suspected arson attack at Dozmary Pool sent 100 metres of gorse up in a single night. Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service attended four large fires in rapid succession. At Rosenannon Downs — a Cornwall Wildlife Trust nature reserve — nearly 50 acres burned to the ground, killing adders, lizards, field mice and the nesting birds whose eggs the conservation sector spends enormous sums trying to protect: skylarks, meadow pipits, ground-nesting speci

Friends of the Dales is a small Yorkshire charity with a modest footprint and a pleasant-sounding mission: protecting and enhancing the Yorkshire Dales for the communities that live there. Its "Eyes on the Skies" campaign, launched last autumn, is presented as a community response to raptor persecution - local people standing up for local wildlife. A closer look at the campaign's architecture, its speakers, its evidence base, and its political demands reveals it is nothing of

More than 1,500 farmers, gamekeepers, publicans, and field sports enthusiasts have pledged their support for a campaign to have community grouse conservation and shooting formally recognised in the UK's Inventories of Living Heritage. The initiative, Our Upland Living Heritage , is backed by the Moorland Association, Countryside Alliance, and National Gamekeepers Organisation. It seeks inclusion in the national inventories established following the UK's ratification of the 20

There is a particular kind of institutional embarrassment that comes from being proven wrong by the people you spent years dismissing. The wildfire at Danes Moss Nature Reserve on Tuesday should be producing exactly that feeling in the offices of every conservation body and every DEFRA official that spent the last decade telling moorland managers, gamekeepers and land agents that they don't know what they're talking about. They knew. They said so. Nobody listened. For genera

Andrew Gilruth's appearance before the Environmental Audit Committee's Peatland Inquiry on 4th March was a masterclass in evidence-based advocacy — calm, authoritative, and grounded in the realities that Westminster too often ignores. As Chief Executive of the Moorland Association, representing those who manage one million acres of upland Britain, Gilruth arrived not just with a brief but with forensic command of the detail. From the physics of pyro-convection to the bureaucr

After only a few days of dry weather, the first moorland wildfire of the year has already been recorded in the Peak District . Thanks to the rapid response from crews at Slaithwaite Fire Station, the incident was quickly brought under control. But events like this should prompt a wider conversation about how our uplands are managed — and the consequences when practical land management is restricted or undervalued. Moorlands are living landscapes that require active stewardshi

Defra and Natural England have been lucky so far. It started raining just after they persuaded Minister Mary Creagh to stop rotational cool burning , and it has rained more or less continuously since. The downside is that all this time the vegetation is growing. When the hills dry out, there will be the devil to pay. One of our nation's greatest pieces of good fortune is that centuries of managing peatlands for pasturage and shooting have, almost by chance, kept our vast stor

Two gamekeepers from the Moscar Estate, part of the Peak District Moorland Group, are being praised for saving the life of a 17-year-old girl who collapsed in freezing blizzard conditions on Stanage Edge — one of the Peak District's most popular but exposed walking spots. Rheyah Rowe became unresponsive on Monday 17 February while on a family walk across the Moscar Estate. Her mother, Carla, and three children had set off at 8am in bright, freezing conditions with snow on the

The draft 2026–2031 Forest of Bowland National Landscape Management Plan is out for consultation. It closes on 2 March. At 191 pages across multiple documents, it represents a significant investment of time and public money. It also represents a significant missed opportunity — because the people who actually manage most of this landscape, the gamekeepers, appear to have been written out of it. The Forest of Bowland is one of England's most important upland landscapes. Its ch

A webinar hosted by the Friends of the Dales' ' Eyes on the Skies ' initiative featured Detective Inspector Mark Harrison making extraordinary claims about the moorland shooting community — claims that reveal more about the disconnect between urban-facing campaign policing and rural reality than they do about wildlife crime. When the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority quietly disbanded its Bird of Prey Partnership last summer — a cross-sector group that included Natural

The Moorland Association, Countryside Alliance, and National Gamekeepers Organisation have joined forces to get grouse conservation and shooting recognised in the UK's new Inventories of Living Heritage. The campaign, Our Upland Living Heritage , launched today with a simple but powerful argument: the traditions, skills, and community networks built around moorland management are as much a part of Britain's cultural fabric as bell-ringing, dry-stone walling, or Highland games

Ministers told Parliament a key burning report was rigorously peer-reviewed. Freedom of Information disclosures tell a very different story. Natural England's evidence review on managed burning — a document now shaping policy, stewardship conditions, and regulatory enforcement across England's uplands — was assured to Parliament as having undergone "rigorous peer review." It is a claim that, under the weight of the agency's own disclosed records, appears increasingly difficul

Packham with convicted terrorist bomb maker Mel Broughton Chris Packham’s shrills of hysteria get more ridiculous by the day. In his latest effort to demonise rural communities he wants you to believe that the Peak District is a ‘Raptor death zone’. Speaking about his time filming Springwatch, the BBC presenter claimed that during three weeks at the National Trust's Longshaw Estate, he did not see "a single Buzzard or a single Kite flying over," describing the managed moorla

Nobody enjoys snaring. Even those who do it for a living take no pleasure in it. Effective snaring demands considerable skill, good equipment, real commitment, and hard physical work. It is also a sitting duck for critics: if anything goes wrong, it will be front-page news; if nothing goes wrong, it is disturbingly easy to stage a shock-horror photograph with a roadkill badger or cat. Yet snaring, in its modern form, remains one of the most important tools available to conser