Moorland Association

Moorland Association The Moorland Association is a members organisation who collectively manage over a fifth of the uplands in England and Wales.

Over the last 100 years, considerable areas of heather have been lost through over-grazing, afforestation and bracken encroachment, and since its formation in 1986 Moorland Association members have regenerated and recovered 217,000 acres, smashing the Government’s 2010 conservation target by 170%. Where there has been grouse shooting, heather loss has been lower (70%) than in upland areas not managed for grouse.

🔥 Light a careful burn or let a wildfire rip - Scotland's new tool can't tell the difference.A report commissioned by Na...
10/06/2026

🔥 Light a careful burn or let a wildfire rip - Scotland's new tool can't tell the difference.

A report commissioned by NatureScot lays out a draft way of scoring peatland health. A lot of it is sensible: it ditches the rigid depth thresholds and looks instead at whether the bog still works as a living, connected system - the way the people who manage that ground already think.

Then it stumbles. The tool hands "burning" a single point of penalty and makes no distinction between a planned cool burn and a wildfire that's torn through a hillside. Same mark for both. The same mark, in fact, as an access track.

That number feeds straight into how much restoration a development on peat is made to fund. And it wasn't measured against real emissions - it was set by judgement, tested on synthetic scenarios. The authors call it a draft.

A Scottish tool for now. But the science behind it doesn't stop at the border.

Read the full article - link in the comments 👇

09/06/2026

This video shows a brood of 20 grey partridges on managed moorland where predation is reduced to give vulnerable ground nesters a fighting chance of survival.

🎞️ Courtesy of Yorkshire Dales Moorland Group.

🌫️ Wildfire smoke travels - and it kills.In England, the fires that do the most damage happen on open ground. Between 20...
09/06/2026

🌫️ Wildfire smoke travels - and it kills.

In England, the fires that do the most damage happen on open ground. Between 2009 and 2021, heath, peat and grassland made up 70% of the area burned by wildfire - from only 30% of incidents. Where fuel builds up unmanaged, the burns get bigger.

A new US study has now put a number on that cost. Across America, wildfire smoke has undone roughly a decade of clean-air progress, with researchers linking it to more than 300 extra deaths a year.

Those figures highlight the case for active management, made plainer than ever.

Read the full article - link in the comments 👇

This is what good moorland management looks like.An oystercatcher has chosen a three-year-old managed burn to lay its eg...
08/06/2026

This is what good moorland management looks like.

An oystercatcher has chosen a three-year-old managed burn to lay its eggs.

Low-intensity burning, carried out only where appropriate by experienced moorland professionals, helps create the mixed-age heather and open structure many ground-nesting birds need.

It also reduces dangerous fuel loads, helps protect peat from severe wildfire, and keeps practical fire skills alive in the uplands.

📷 Courtesy of Peak District Moorland Group.

🌳 We manage some of Britain's biggest carbon stores - and most of it is underground.On a heather moor, the carbon isn't ...
08/06/2026

🌳 We manage some of Britain's biggest carbon stores - and most of it is underground.

On a heather moor, the carbon isn't mostly in the heather, or in the trees someone wants to plant. It's locked in the dark, peaty soil beneath your boots, built up over thousands of years.

That's why "plant trees here for the climate" can backfire. On carbon-rich moorland soils, getting woodland going - or just letting birch scrub creep in - can release more carbon from the ground than the young trees ever store. And that loss runs on for decades.

In north-east Scotland, soils under birch held less carbon than the open moor next door - even after 39 years. In Deeside, the heather ground held around 50% more soil carbon than birch and pine that had seeded in on their own.

Get it right and woodland is a gift. Get it wrong and a scheme that looks green on a map is quietly losing carbon. Right tree, right place, right soil.

Read the full article - link in the comments 👇

The Government has just won the right to keep its heather burning rules - by telling the court the licence system is a r...
07/06/2026

The Government has just won the right to keep its heather burning rules - by telling the court the licence system is a real way out. We're going to hold it to that.

⚖️ The Court of Appeal has refused us permission to appeal. It did not call our wildfire warnings trivial - the ruling lists them: greater wildfire risk, strain on fire services, carbon released by severe fires, harm to public health.

But the judges rested heavily on one fact - this isn't an outright ban, because managers can still apply to burn under licence.

🔥 That makes the licence regime the whole defence. So it has to work in the field, not just on paper.

We're asking members: where an application is justified, make one - and record everything. How long it takes, what it costs, every obstacle and refusal.

Each one builds the case for reform. The legal route is closed. The argument isn't.

Defra has announced £30 million for nature recovery and left out the people who do much of the work: gamekeepers.💷 We've...
07/06/2026

Defra has announced £30 million for nature recovery and left out the people who do much of the work: gamekeepers.

💷 We've written again to Parliament's Public Accounts Committee with one question - where does the money actually go?

Across England's moors, our members already manage blanket bog and the breeding grounds of curlew, lapwing, golden plover, merlin and black grouse. None of that comes from a press release. It comes from grazing, grip blocking, predator control and wildfire prevention, set to each site and repeated every year.

📉 The fear is the familiar one: funding swallowed by consultancy, partnerships and reporting long before it reaches the hill.

Defra's announcement names farmers, conservation groups and communities. The keepers holding wader habitat together and cutting wildfire risk are delivery partners, not an afterthought. Judge the spending by what changes on the ground.

Upland policy gets argued in the language of carbon, targets and nature recovery - usually by people who've never blocke...
07/06/2026

Upland policy gets argued in the language of carbon, targets and nature recovery - usually by people who've never blocked a grip or counted a curlew brood.

🏞️ Parliament's EFRA Committee has opened an inquiry into the future of upland farms and landscapes, and it has said outright it wants to hear from the people who know these places best.

Here's what those people see that the modelling doesn't:

• Remote maps misreading peat depth no one has ever walked
• Fuel loads building on unmanaged ground, one dry spring from a serious fire
• Agri-environment rules drawn for lowland farms, bolted onto hefted hill flocks

📝 The uplands aren't a blank canvas for national targets. They're worked landscapes, held together by grazing, keepering, burning and predator control, year on year.

Submissions close 26 June 2026. When Parliament writes about the hills, the people who manage them shouldn't be the last to speak.

Ministers Are Ignoring 15 Years of Their Own Burning Evidence: Our Letter to The Telegraph
07/06/2026

Ministers Are Ignoring 15 Years of Their Own Burning Evidence: Our Letter to The Telegraph

The law Defra is drafting to ban trail hunting could land on the dog that finds a wounded deer on the hill.🐕 Defra is co...
06/06/2026

The law Defra is drafting to ban trail hunting could land on the dog that finds a wounded deer on the hill.

🐕 Defra is consulting on prohibiting trail hunting in England and Wales. We're not here to defend or attack the activity. We're here about working dogs.

On a moor, dogs work lawfully every day - flushing to guns, recovering shot or wounded game, deer stalking, pest and predator control. Much of that relies on training with animal-based scents.

⚠️ Drafted loosely, a ban could:

• Catch legitimate working-dog use and scent training
• Reopen Hunting Act exemptions that upland management depends on
• Leave landowners liable for activity they never authorised, on open ground with a dozen ways in

A law written to stop one thing must not quietly criminalise another. Get the definitions right before it takes effect - not after the first prosecution.

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