AN ‘ENORMOUS’ amount of restoration work is taking place at the most damaged blanket bog peatland in the National Park. Thousands of tonnes of coir, brash and stone have been brought this spring to Fleet Moss, Oughtershaw and Bleaberry – an area of moorland covering 166 hectares, located six kilometres south of of Hawes. The coir logs and stone, brought to site by helicopter, are being used to block erosion channels. Brash – a mixture of cut heather, cotton grass and other peatland plants – is being spread over bare areas of peat to re-seed it and protect it from eroding further. Much precious peat has been washed off the moor in recent decades. On parts of Fleet Moss, channels four metres deep have appeared. This means four thousand years of history have in effect been swept away, as peat is formed by sphagnum mosses at a rate of one metre depth every thousand years.
Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s restoration work on the most eroded area of blanket bog in Yorkshire is receiving a boost with a whopping £312,000 from the grant-giving charity the Garfield Weston Foundation. Fleet Moss is one of the most degraded upland peatlands in Yorkshire. The bog is criss-crossed with drainage ditches (grips) and erosion channels (gullies) that flush water and sediment into the Wharfe and Ure river catchments. Yorkshire Wildlife Trust has already installed hundreds of dams and sediment traps on Fleet Moss to hold water and peat on the bog and allow vegetation to re-establish. In some areas, though, so much sediment is eroding that the traps are already full and over-flowing within months of being installed; normally this would take years. Yorkshire Wildlife Trust urgently needs to return to build up the height on the sediment traps and plant more cotton-grass and bog mosses. Thanks to the generous funding from Garfield Weston Foundation, they can.