They Were Warned On Tuesday. By Wednesday Night The Moor Was Ablaze.
- C4PMC
- Jun 26
- 5 min read
Some warnings arrive too late to be heeded. Others are ignored in real time. On Tuesday 23 June, Parliament delivered one of the clearest warnings the upland community has heard spoken aloud in years.
Giving evidence to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, Natural England's Chief Scientist faced a verdict from the Committee Chair, Alistair Carmichael, that cut to the heart of a decade of failed moorland policy: "You haven't taken people in the upland community with you." It was a simple sentence, and a devastating one. The agency charged with protecting England's natural environment stood accused of shutting out the very people best placed to help it prevent disaster.
Barely twenty-four hours later, disaster came. On Wednesday night a wildfire tore across Arnfield Moor on the Dovestone estate, the upland managed by the RSPB and United Utilities above the Longdendale valley.
It is precisely the kind of fire that the approach defended in that committee room is supposed to make less likely. Instead, crews from two fire and rescue services spent more than a day fighting a blaze that closed a major trans-Pennine road, drew in a water-bombing helicopter and pushed a wall of smoke across the towns below.
The fire broke out at around 10pm on Wednesday 24 June. By Thursday morning six fire engines, a water carrier and a welfare unit were in attendance on Tintwistle Moor, with firefighters from Chapel-en-le-Frith, Buxton, Hathersage and Glossop joined by Hyde and Stalybridge crews from Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service.
They worked alongside the Peak District Fire Operations Group, Peak Park rangers, the Eastern Moors Partnership, the RSPB and United Utilities. A helicopter was brought in to drop water on the flames.
The A628 Woodhead Pass was closed in both directions between the Gun Inn at Mottram Moor and the Flouch roundabout, and remained shut into Friday. With the Snake Pass already closed for roadworks, both principal routes across this stretch of the Pennines were lost at once, and traffic was diverted onto the M62.
The smoke plume was reported to be visible from passenger aircraft, and with the wind blowing from the south-east it was carried north-west over the northern fringe of Greater Manchester, where residents were told to keep windows and doors shut. The cost of that disruption, to hauliers, commuters and businesses on both sides of the hills, will have been considerable.
It has been suggested that the fire was started by a campfire that got out of control. This is the part that should give pause. The Dovestone estate is managed without the rotational cool burning that keepers have used on neighbouring ground for generations to break up the fuel load and create firebreaks.
The RSPB and United Utilities have favoured rewetting and a hands-off approach, on the argument that wetter, restored moorland resists fire. A campfire on a hot, dry June night has just tested that argument in the most public way imaginable, and the result was a fire that took two fire services, a helicopter and more than a day to bring under control.
The timing could hardly be more pointed. For years, gamekeepers and land managers have warned that restricting controlled burning, grazing and cutting allows dead vegetation to build into a tinderbox, so that when a spark inevitably arrives the fire is hotter, faster and more destructive than anything seen on actively managed ground.
New regulations introduced in 2021 sharply reduced fuel-load management across England's moors. The upland community has said, repeatedly, where that road leads. On Tuesday a select committee chair said it too. On Wednesday night Arnfield Moor proved the point.
So the questions are fair, and they are not rhetorical. What fire-prevention infrastructure was in place on this estate? Where were the breaks meant to halt a fire of this kind, and how did they perform when it mattered? If restored moorland is more resilient to fire, why did a single careless campfire produce an incident on this scale, in conditions that are only going to become more common?
What happened on Arnfield Moor is not an isolated misfortune. It is the latest entry in a long and depressingly familiar list. Marsden, Saddleworth, Dovestone, Crowden, Darwin, Winterhill, Forsinard: moors managed by the RSPB, or to the RSPB's no-burn prescription, that have suffered serious wildfires in recent years, several of them more than once.
Marsden Moor has burned so many times that those who watch it have lost count. The Dovestone reserve's own managers have acknowledged minor fires in most years and a major blaze roughly every decade. These are not small events. By the estimates cited across the sector, the 2018 Saddleworth fire released in the region of 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the Moray fire some 700,000 tonnes and the Forsinard fire around 300,000 tonnes. That is roughly a million and a half tonnes of carbon from three fires alone, drawn from peat that took thousands of years to form and that will take centuries, if ever, to recover. It is the precise opposite of what the management was meant to achieve.
And the carbon is only the part that can be counted. These fires tear through moorland in the height of the breeding season, when the ground is full of nesting birds that cannot escape the flames. The irony is bitter. The dunlin, golden plover, curlew and other ground-nesting species that the rewetting regime is supposed to protect are among the first to die when the unbroken fuel load it leaves behind finally catches.
Eggs, chicks and adult birds are lost, along with the reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates that make up the living moor. A managed mosaic gives wildlife firebreaks to survive behind. Rank, continuous vegetation gives a fire nothing to stop it and gives the animals nowhere to go.
Set that against the managed grouse moors next door. It is not that fires never start on keepered ground, of course they do, there are countless ignitions every season from lightning, discarded cigarettes, disposable barbecues and worse. The difference is what happens next. On ground where the fuel load has been broken up by rotational cutting and cool burning, and where gamekeepers are on hand to act within minutes, ignitions are caught small and put out before they run.
On rank, unmanaged moorland with no breaks to stop them, the same spark becomes a fire that burns for days and takes the army and a fleet of fire engines to contain. Indeed, on more than one recent occasion it has been gamekeepers on neighbouring shooting estates who have stepped in to help halt fires spreading off unmanaged RSPB land onto their own.
This is the pattern the upland community has been describing for years, and which Parliament finally acknowledged on Tuesday. The fuel builds up. The conditions turn. The spark arrives, as it always eventually does. And the ground that was left unmanaged burns, while the ground that was managed does not.
No one chooses for their land to burn, and the firefighters and partner organisations who fought this blaze deserve real credit for the effort. But credit for fighting a fire is not the same as a case for the management that preceded it. Parliament has now said plainly what the uplands have long understood.
The agencies and bodies shaping moorland policy have not brought their communities with them. Until they do, the moors will keep building fuel, the wildfires will keep growing, and the people who could help prevent them will keep being shut out of the conversation. As the wildlife of Arnfield Moor counts the cost, the public, and the communities choking on the smoke, are owed a huge apology and compensation by the RSPB for getting their decisions wrong time and time again.
