The National Trust claim they are ‘demoralised’ by their wildfire, yet fail to acknowledge their own responsibility

The National Trust’s Rosie Holdsworth says the wildfires tearing through Marsden Moor have been "demoralising" for those managing the land, but the National Trust should take a long look at themselves before seeking public sympathy.

Three hundred hectares of moorland have been reduced to ash. Again. Moorland managers who helped tackle the blaze have already said what needs saying: this did not have to happen at this scale. Fuel breaks and proper management would have stopped a single ignition becoming a landscape-level catastrophe. That is not speculation. It is the lesson that professional moorland managers have been trying to teach for years, to an organisation that has consistently refused to listen.

The National Trust has spent those same years doing the opposite of land management. It has campaigned against controlled burning, lobbied for tighter restrictions, and lent its considerable institutional weight to an environmental movement that has successfully pressured government into making managed burning harder to carry out. Those restrictions are now on the statute book. Licences must be obtained from Defra and Natural England before the kind of routine vegetation management that breaks up fire fuel can take place.

The Trust cheered that process on. It should reflect on what it has achieved.

The charity plants Sphagnum moss and calls it fire prevention. It is not. Rewetting programmes have their place, but they are no substitute for the removal of the dense, dry, standing vegetation that turns a discarded barbecue into a 300-hectare inferno. The Trust knows this. Its own land managers on the ground know this. The fire service, who would rather attend a lit barbecue than a landscape fire, know this. Only the Trust's senior leadership and its environmental allies appear not to.

What the Trust has consistently refused to acknowledge is that the traditional management it has worked so hard to restrict was, among other things, a fire management system developed over generations. Gamekeepers and moorland managers did not burn heather for their own pleasure They burned it because unmanaged moorland burns anyway, just without any of the control, any of the planning, and any of the protection for the communities, wildlife and landscape that now lie in ruins.

Craig Best, the National Trust's Peak District General Manager, has been a visible and vocal opponent of managed burning in this landscape. He has had every opportunity to engage seriously with the moorland management community, to acknowledge the fire prevention case for controlled burning, and to temper the Trust's institutional opposition with some professional humility. He has chosen not to. While his countryside manager speaks publicly of demoralisation and hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on restoration, Best bears direct personal responsibility for the policy direction that made that restoration necessary in the first place. Managing a landscape of this scale and sensitivity is not a communications exercise or a lobbying campaign. It requires hard decisions. Best has made his. Marsden Moor is living with the consequences.

The Trust has every right to be frustrated but it has no right whatsoever to be surprised. When an organisation spends years stripping out the tools that keep a landscape fire-safe, and that landscape then burns on a massive scale, that is not misfortune. It is the entirely predictable result of its own choices.

It is time the National Trust and the government bodies that administer the burning licence regime to urgently and honestly review whether current restrictions are compatible with any serious commitment to protecting moorland from wildfire. The question is not whether managed burning makes for comfortable headlines. The question is whether the alternative, the blackened, ruined landscape now visible across Marsden Moor, is a price the Trust is prepared to keep asking others to pay.