The custodians of the Peak District BBC's Countryfile chose to forget

The Peak District Moorland Group's response to Sunday's Countryfile is well worth a read, and it deserves amplifying. The episode was titled "Custodians of the Peak". On the evidence of the hour that aired, the BBC's definition of a custodian is a narrow one.

We will not rehash the Moorland Group's post in full, but the shape of their complaint is familiar to anyone who has watched rural affairs coverage on the BBC drift in one direction over the last few years.

An episode sold as a portrait of the people looking after the Peak District managed to sideline almost everyone who actually does the looking after. National Park staff were framed as first responders. The gamekeepers, shepherds, farmers and estate teams who are genuinely first on the scene when a fire breaks out, when a walker is injured, when livestock is loose on a road or when a ground nest is predated barely registered.

The mountain hare segment, featuring Professor Carlos Bedson on Bleaklow, is the tell. Here was a chance to explain to a national audience how an iconic species came to be on those moors in the first place. The answer is that sporting estates reintroduced it. Not as a piece of Scottish cosplay, but as part of a tradition of active wildlife management that has, on the ground, delivered a viable population of mountain hare in the English uplands for generations. It is the kind of positive conservation story the BBC claims to want. Viewers did not get it. What they got instead was a passing reference to "hunting interests", as if the hare had simply blown in on the wind.

The Moorland Group's point about Bedson's methodology is also worth dwelling on. His counts have dropped from 25 hares per 10km walk to 13 over a decade, and he is, by his own admission, unsure why. That is a significant decline, and it ought to prompt curiosity about what is happening on the ground. Scrub encroachment in former hare strongholds, rising fuel loads on unmanaged moorland, growing raven and generalist predator pressure, increased public disturbance and heavier tick burdens are all plausible drivers. So is the methodology itself. The Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust's night time transect protocol exists precisely because mountain hares are primarily nocturnal, and it has been tested in the field over many seasons. Choosing not to use it is a choice, and one the programme did not interrogate.

Meanwhile, largely off camera, Peak District sporting estates are now in their fourth consecutive year of mountain hare transects. Some estates have recorded encouraging increases in numbers over the last winter. Hare populations are cyclical, as they are in Scotland, and a single year does not make a recovery. But it is exactly the kind of long-term, self-funded, on-the-ground monitoring that Countryfile's framing of "custodianship" ought to celebrate. Twenty-six research sites, of which just one is a shooting estate, is not a picture of the Peak District. It is a picture of a research design that has quietly written the working moorland out of the story.

This is the wider problem. The Peak District is not a wilderness. It is a worked landscape, and it has been for centuries. Its heather, its ground-nesting birds, its hares, its water quality and its fire resilience are all shaped by decisions made every week by people most viewers will never see on a Sunday evening. When a national broadcaster decides to tell the story of that landscape and chooses to tell it almost without those people in it, the result is not neutrality. It is a particular editorial line, dressed up as scenery.

The Peak District Moorland Group are absolutely right. The gamekeepers, estate staff and rural workers who carried three pick-up loads of litter off a three-mile stretch of moorland road earlier this month, who pay for commercial waste containers out of their own budgets, who cut the firebreaks and monitor the hares and rebuild the walls and turn out at two in the morning when something has gone wrong on the hill, are the custodians of the Peak. Any programme that sets out to describe custodianship in these uplands and cannot find room for them has not made a documentary. It has made a brochure.

We would welcome a return visit from Countryfile, with a longer lens and a wider cast. The Peak District's real custodians are not difficult to find. They are the ones already out there, in the dark and the wet, doing the work.