RSPB's wildfire failures highlighted once again at Crowden and Arnfield

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 smoulder rather than being properly extinguished. Our local source watched two personnel wandering the treeline while two Argocats sat idle beside portable water dams. That is not the picture of an incident being brought to a close.

The immediate question is why the RSPB, which manages this site, hasn't mustered a proper team to deal with peat that is still burning. But the deeper question is how we keep arriving at the same place, on RSPB-managed ground, summer after summer.

Look at the record. Marsden, Saddleworth, Dovestone, Crowden, Darwin, Winterhill, Forsinard — moors either managed by the RSPB or managed to the RSPB's no-burn prescription, and all of them scarred by serious wildfire in recent years, several more than once. Days before this latest blaze, Tintwistle Moor — RSPB-managed land — saw 500 acres burn over two days. In Scotland in 2023, the Corrimony reserve burned for days, undoing twenty years of woodland restoration in a single event. This is not a run of bad luck. It is a recurring outcome on land managed under a single philosophy.

That philosophy holds that leaving moorland to "rewet" and recover will, over time, make it more resilient to fire. There is a genuine long-term case there, and no one serious disputes that healthy, wet blanket bog burns less readily than tinder-dry heather. Natural England makes exactly this argument, and points to Dove Stone in 2018, where damp Sphagnum gullies slowed a fire enough for crews to stop it. Fair enough — as far as it goes.

But rewetting degraded peat is a project of decades, not a plan for this summer's heatwave. And in the years while that restoration is supposed to bed in, the moor is not becoming safer. It is banking fuel. Rank, continuous, unmanaged vegetation gives a fire nothing to stop it — and gives ground-nesting birds nowhere to go. The bitter irony is that the dunlin, golden plover and curlew the no-burn regime is meant to protect are among the first to die when that unbroken fuel load finally catches, in the height of the breeding season, with eggs and chicks on the ground.

Set the unmanaged ground against the keepered moor next door. Controlled "cool" burning — low-intensity fire set in cold, damp conditions to clear old heather — is one of the few tools that actually reduces wildfire fuel in the here and now. Gamekeepers and farmers have used it for generations, and on managed ground it creates a mosaic: firebreaks the wildlife can survive behind, and the fire can stop against.

The RSPB has campaigned hard against this practice, and the Government has now tightened the law on moorland burning across much of the uplands. The result is straightforward and predictable: less preventative burning, more standing fuel, hotter fires.

The Country Land and Business Association has called the burning licence system so slow and complex as to be unfit for purpose — a process that deters the very work that lowers risk. And the figures track the alarm. 2025 was the worst year on record for UK land burned by wildfire, close to 48,000 hectares, far beyond the previous 2019 high of around 29,000.

There's an inconsistency at the heart of the RSPB's position, too. Its own managers have used prescribed fire as an ecological tool — to expand woodland at the moorland edge, to manage capercaillie habitat.

Researchers have noted that by campaigning so absolutely against burning, the organisation risks undermining its own people's ability to use fire where it works. The science on peat and fire is genuinely contested and deserves an honest, unbiased debate. What we have instead is a policy that treats a low-severity managed burn and a catastrophic summer wildfire as if they were the same thing.

This is where the record becomes hardest to defend. On more than one recent occasion it has been gamekeepers from neighbouring shooting estates who have stepped in to help halt fires spreading off unmanaged RSPB land onto their own. Meanwhile, some organisations restrict their own staff from tackling an active fire-front at all. Even Natural England — the body that sets the policy — won't let its people near anything over a square metre. A square metre is an office bin fire. It is not a moorland blaze.

None of this takes anything away from the Fire and Rescue Service crews and the Fire Operations Group partners who fought Crowden in brutal conditions. Their effort was immense, and credit for fighting a fire is real. But credit for fighting a fire is not the same as a case for the management that preceded it.

In June, giving evidence to the EFRA Committee, Natural England's Chief Scientist was told plainly by the committee chair that the agency had failed to bring the upland community with it. A veteran Peak District gamekeeper put it more starkly still: unless the deliberate build-up of fuel loads stops, it is only a matter of time before someone is killed. Barely a day later, Arnfield Moor was ablaze.

That is the cycle. The fuel builds. The conditions turn. The spark arrives, as it always eventually does. The ground that was left unmanaged burns, and the ground that was managed does not.

So the question stands — and it isn't only the moorland sector asking it. Why is peat still burning underground at Crowden with no proper team on it? And how much longer will a policy that strips away the one tool capable of reducing fuel this summer be defended as if it were working, while the record on the ground says the opposite?