Rewilded, Rewetted and Burned

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 summer has undone the better part of a third of a decade's work. The company calls this devastating. It is. What it never asks is why that much of it burned.

A wildfire needs heat, oxygen and fuel. Weather supplies the first two and no land manager controls them. Fuel is the one variable that can be managed years in advance — and fuel is the only element of the fire triangle the post does not mention. There is carbon storage, water filtration, wildlife, a detailed account of the response and advice about barbecues. There is nothing whatsoever about vegetation. The reason that omission is convenient has less to do with United Utilities than with the organisation it pays to manage the ground.

The common denominator

Tintwistle is owned by United Utilities and managed by the RSPB. Dovestone is RSPB-managed. Arnfield, which burned in 2018, is both. When the Cairngorms went up this year, the fire began at Abernethy — RSPB-owned.

At some point a pattern stops being bad luck. A charity that has spent years telling government how moorland ought to be managed has now presided over some of the worst peat fires in recent British history, on the ground held up as the model. Its answer, consistently, is the weather — convenient, because the alternative implicates the whole philosophy.

Rewetting is not a fire strategy in a drought

Tintwistle had been extensively rewetted — the flagship technique of modern restoration, and the one United Utilities celebrates when it counts up hectares. It burned anyway: fiercely, smoke across Manchester, and down into the peat, which is precisely what rewetting is meant to prevent. Leaky dams do useful things in an ordinary British summer; in the hottest June on record they do very little, because surface vegetation dries out regardless of what is happening two feet down.

The Moorland Association puts the consequence plainly: land taken out of active management accumulates dead, tinder-dry vegetation that ignites easily and burns hot. On Tintwistle, they say, the RSPB has rewilded ground and created exactly that. The problem is not that the RSPB rewets — it is that it rewets instead of managing fuel, and campaigns to deny the second tool to everyone else.

The cage it helped build

The RSPB is no bystander to the regime that has left heather waist-deep across the Peak District. It has been among the loudest voices against rotational burning, and when Natural England banned burning on deep peat and moved to license it out of existence elsewhere, it moved in a direction the charity had long urged. So it cannot plead constraint. Where private estates are stopped from reducing fuel load, the RSPB is a reason why; where it declines to burn or graze its own ground, that is a choice.

John Kirk of the Cairngorms National Park Authority told the Strathspey Herald that everyone was furious and the entire Abernethy forest had no firebreaks. Not too few — none. The Park's own wildfire plan had stated in terms that reducing deer and stopping burning would raise fuel loads and the need for fire risk mitigation. They were warned in writing.

Then there is the carbon. A winter cool burn takes the rank heather off the top and leaves the moss barely touched; a July wildfire burns into the peat itself, as last year's North York Moors fire did for over a month across 2,500 hectares. The RSPB has spent its political capital opposing the first, and the result has been more of the second, on its own land.

Who held the line

An emergency operation on that scale is not evidence of stewardship. It is the bill that arrives when prevention has been given up — and much of it was met by people neither organisation names. At Tintwistle the fire's northwest flank was contained when local gamekeepers and Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue cut a firebreak with two diggers and a bulldozer, on the neighbouring Stalybridge estate: privately owned, actively managed. The Peak District Moorland Group estimates the month's keepering effort would have cost the taxpayer millions had the fire service done it alone.

The fire stopped at the boundary between land managed one way and land managed the other. Keepers whose methods the RSPB campaigns against spent a month saving ground the RSPB had made more flammable, for nothing, knowing all the while that Natural England prosecutes land managers for inadvertent breaches of habitat rules. In United Utilities' account they appear inside the phrase "catchment and land managers" — gratitude pitched at exactly the level of abstraction required to avoid naming a gamekeeper.

What is asked, and of whom

The post closes by asking walkers to bin their cigarettes: sensible, and aimed at the only group with no power over fuel load. United Utilities should instead publish the fire risk assessment and vegetation management position for every holding, RSPB-managed ground included, and say whether cool burning was applied on the burned areas in the last five years.

The RSPB should publish fuel load and firebreak provision for Tintwistle, Dovestone and Abernethy as at the start of this summer, and either withdraw its opposition to controlled burning as a fuel management tool or say what it proposes instead that works in a drought.

Thanking everyone and blaming the weather is not a wildfire plan. It is a press release.