Bodmin wildfire the latest reminder to Natural England that rewetting won't stop a match

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 species that cannot flee and cannot be replaced mid-season.

The fires are not an anomaly. Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service reports that wildfire incidents in the county increased by 80 per cent last year compared with the previous year, averaging close to two per week. Across England's uplands, the pattern repeats itself with dismal regularity. And each time it does, the official response from Natural England and its allies follows a predictable script: more rewetting, more passive management, more withdrawal of the human presence that has historically kept these landscapes alive.

Moorland communities have been saying for years that this approach is not just ecologically misguided. It is actively dangerous. Bodmin Moor is the latest evidence.

Wildfires Do Not Start Themselves. People Start Them.

There is a fact about British wildfires that Natural England would rather not confront, because confronting it would undermine the entire intellectual architecture of its upland management policy. That fact is this: in the UK, wildfires are almost never naturally ignited. They are started by human beings,  deliberately or accidentally, and they are an expression of human behaviour, not ecological conditions.

Unlike Australia or parts of the American West, where lightning strikes in genuinely remote terrain can ignite fires in vast, unpopulated landscapes, Britain's moorlands are small, fragmented and threaded through with roads, footpaths and visitor access points.

The combination of circumstances required for natural ignition — a lightning strike, sufficient dry fuel mass, no rain for weeks — is possible in theory and vanishingly rare in practice. What is not rare is a carelessly discarded cigarette. A disposable barbecue left 'cooling' on a hillside. A campfire that gets away from its maker. Or, as at Dozmary Pool this spring, an individual who appears to have deliberately set fire to protected moorland and walked away.

The Cornwall Wildlife Trust said of the Rosenannon Downs fire: "These fires are started by people who clearly don't understand the damage they are doing." That is a generous interpretation. In cases of suspected arson, it is not ignorance at work. It is malice, or indifference so profound as to be indistinguishable from it. Either way, the response required is not a change in vegetation structure. It is a change in human behaviour, human enforcement and human presence on the ground.

Natural England's policy framework addresses none of this. It is not designed to. Because Natural England does not think of wildfire as a human problem. It thinks of it as an ecological one and that category error is costing moorland ecosystems dearly.

The Rewetting Delusion

Natural England's preferred solution to moorland fire risk is the restoration of blanket bog hydrology. Rewet the peat, raise the water table, and the argument runs that saturated ground is harder to ignite than desiccated ground. This is not false, as a narrow technical proposition. A well-hydrated blanket bog does offer some additional resistance to surface fire.

But as a fire management strategy, it is a delusion, and an expensive, heavily-subsidised one at that. Rewetting does not stop arsonists. It does not intercept a walker who drops a cigarette on a dry grass margin. It does not prevent a group of visitors from using a single-use barbecue twenty metres from a bog edge. It does not address the behaviour of the individuals who drove to Bodmin Moor this March and set fire to a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Raise the water table as high as you like: the match still works.

More fundamentally, the rewetting agenda is predicated on a model of fire risk in which the landscape is the variable and the human being is a constant. In reality, in Britain, in the twenty-first century, the opposite is true. The landscape is largely fixed. The human being in their millions, with their cars and their freedom of access and their variable judgement is the variable that matters.

Policy that ignores this is not serious fire management. It is comfort blanket ecology, designed to satisfy the bureaucratic instincts of an organisation that is far more comfortable commissioning hydrological surveys than confronting the behavioural realities of mass countryside access.

Natural England has spent years and public money promoting a vision of the uplands in which managed burning is the primary fire hazard and rewetted bog is the solution. Meanwhile, the fires keep starting on roadsides, near car parks, on nature reserves, on common land exactly where you would expect them to start if you understood that people, not peat dryness, are the ignition source.

What Managed Moorland Actually Does

Here is what Natural England will not say publicly, because saying it would require acknowledging that the keepered, managed estates it has spent fifteen years trying to regulate out of existence are, in the specific context of wildfire, significantly safer than the passive landscapes it champions.

A managed grouse moor is not simply a landscape. It is a managed system with a human infrastructure. Gamekeepers are present on the ground, year-round, across extensive beats that they know intimately. They know where the dry spots are. They know where walkers come in off the road. They know which areas are vulnerable after a dry spring. When a fire starts, accidentally, through a spark from farm machinery, through a visitor's carelessness, a keeper will typically see it within minutes, not hours.

Rotational burning, the practice that Natural England has worked so hard to restrict and in some areas effectively ban, is not, contrary to the caricature promoted by rewilding advocates, a fire hazard. It is, properly executed, a fire management tool. By removing accumulated fuel loads in controlled, planned burns under appropriate weather conditions, keepers reduce the volume of dry combustible material available to an uncontrolled fire.

A moor that has been rotationally burned has a mosaic of vegetation in different stages of growth. A moor that has been left unmanaged has a uniform carpet of old, dry, woody heather exactly the fuel load that turns a small accidental fire into a landscape-scale disaster.

This is not theory. Fire services and land managers have said it explicitly, repeatedly. The managed mosaic is harder to burn catastrophically than the uniform unmanaged sward. The keeper who is present is more valuable than any amount of rewetting grant funding.

And yet Natural England's upland policy has, for over a decade, been systematically oriented towards removing both: restricting or ending rotational burning, reducing the economic viability of keepered estates, and replacing active management with passive stewardship models that put decision-making in the hands of remote officials and remove it from people who live and work on the land.

Natural England was established to provide independent expert advice on the natural environment. In the context of upland fire management, it has failed in that function. Its policy positions on moorland management are not based on a complete accounting of the evidence. They are based on a selective reading of the ecology that systematically discounts the human dimension of fire risk, the value of active management as early warning infrastructure, and the real-world consequences of removing keeper presence from the uplands.

The agency has presided over a sustained campaign to delegitimise and eventually end traditional moorland management. It has done so while producing, in support of its rewetting agenda, modelling and impact assessments that are sophisticated in their hydrology and naive in their social science.

The Bodmin Moor fires did not happen because the peat was too dry. They happened because human beings started them and because the infrastructure of managed presence that might have detected them earlier, contained them faster or deterred them altogether has been progressively weakened by a policy environment hostile to the people who provide it.

Natural England cannot rewet its way out of that responsibility.