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. Work on the ground has now been paused for the ground nesting bird season but it will begin again in July, before the three-year project comes to an end in December.
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.
Pete Iveson was starting at 3.45am so he could get round his Buttertubs route in the Yorkshire Dales AN equivalent 14 Olympic swimming pools full of road salt has been used by a council as it battles to keep the roads safe this winter. North Yorkshire County Council s highways teams have worked 24/7 to battle the extreme weather and are reassuring residents they are prepared for any more to come. In the month from Christmas to mid-January alone, 20,000 tonnes of salt was used and more than106 farming contractors are also on-call to plough ahead of the gritters in extreme conditions. One of those, Pete Iveson, ploughs and treats Buttertubs and Fleet Moss – Yorkshire’s highest road – in the Dales.
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.