Wildfires continue to rage across Peak District after idiots set off fireworks, as the real cost of a failure to manage vegetation becomes clearer to RSPB
- C4PMC
- 7 minutes ago
- 3 min read
As dawn broke over the Peak District this morning, gamekeepers who had spent the entire night on Tintwistle Moor were still there, beating back flames alongside exhausted fire crews. They were not on the clock. No public body was invoicing anyone for their hours. They turned out, as they always do, because they know this ground better than anyone alive and because watching it burn is unbearable to the people who spend every other day of the year looking after it.
Overnight, Derbyshire Fire & Rescue Service declared a major incident. Five fire engines, two Unimogs, an argocat, a command unit and a water carrier are in attendance, supported by the Peak District Fire Operations Group, United Utilities, Derby Mountain Rescue and Derbyshire Constabulary. The blaze, first reported on 24 June, has now consumed an area the size of more than 350 football pitches. Smoke is drifting into built-up areas, and residents have been told to keep their windows shut. This is no longer only a countryside story. It is a public health one.
It is worth asking how a single ignition became a three-week major incident costing the taxpayer an enormous sum. The spark and the fuel are not the same thing.
The fire was started by fireworks, from individuals wanting to "set the sky on fire", to commemorate a friend who had recently died, as shown by social media accounts. It is just the latest example of the reckless behaviour that land managers warn about every summer, and it has nothing to do with the people who manage these moors. But an ignition source is only half the story. A spark lands on every moor in Britain at some point. What decides whether it fizzles out or becomes a 500-acre inferno is what the spark lands in.
And here is the truth for those who have campaigned so loudly against controlled burning: you cannot spend years demanding that moorland be left unmanaged, allowing dead vegetation and tinder-dry fuel to build up season after season, and then express surprise when that fuel does exactly what fuel does.
Controlled burning, carried out by trained gamekeepers in cool, damp conditions under strict supervision, removes that fuel load in small, deliberate patches. It creates firebreaks. It is the single most effective tool we have for ensuring that when the inevitable careless spark arrives, it has nowhere to run. Remove that tool, and you are not protecting the moor. You are loading the gun.
It has not escaped notice that RSPB Dovestone is"burning furiously," with heat, wind, slope and fuel loads all stacking against the crews fighting it. The RSPB has been among the most vocal advocates for restricting the controlled burning that reduces exactly those fuel loads. The organisation is entitled to its convictions. But there is something hard to stomach in watching a body campaign to strip working estates of their management tools, campaign against the grouse moors and privately run estates that have quietly maintained these landscapes for generations, and then watch land under that very philosophy of non-intervention go up in flames.
The estates now sending their keepers out through the night to fight this fire are the same estates the RSPB would see restricted or shut down. They are absorbing the cost, the risk and the sleepless nights, at no charge to the public purse, to protect ground that benefits everyone. Meanwhile the bill for the wider emergency response, the fire appliances, the specialist resources, the multi-agency effort, falls on the taxpayer. Those resources are, as DFRS itself points out, resources that could otherwise be responding to life-threatening emergencies elsewhere in Derbyshire.
If your policy leaves the moors thick with fuel, you own a share of what happens when they burn. You cannot campaign against the very management that would have contained this fire and then present yourself as the victim of it. The gamekeepers on that hillside tonight did not cause this. They are the reason it is not far worse.
When the moors burn, someone always pays. Right now it is the firefighters, the taxpayer, the residents shutting their windows against the smoke, and the keepers risking their lives for free. It is long past time the people who campaigned for this outcome were asked to account for it.
