Lee Hardy, LNP Vice Chair and Natalie Poulter, Dorset Catchment Partnerships Co-ordinator
Thanks to Defra’s Nature for Climate Peatland Grant Scheme (NCPGS), the Wytch Farm Landscape Access & Enhancement Fund and a range of partner contributions, the Dorset Peat Partnership is currently delivering £1.1m worth of peatland restoration, working across 16 sites covering a total of 172ha within the Dorset Heaths SAC. However, when I talk to people about the fantastic work carried out by our partners, a common reaction is a slightly confused expression and the question “Peat? In Dorset?”. Yes! Dorset has peat but not in the vast, windswept upland setting of parts of Wales, northern England or the moors of the south west. Rather, Dorset’s peat is often found as around 150 valley mires in small, shallow pockets, jewels within the habitat mosaic of our treasured heathlands.
Like many of those vast areas of moorland, Dorset’s peatlands are in a poor and declining state, becoming increasingly fragmented and dried out as a result of historic drainage. Some are hidden under forestry plantations and many are over-run with Molinia, scrub and self-set trees which have taken advantage of the drier conditions and themselves contribute to further drying through transpiration.
Healthy peat habitats are home to fantastically diverse and highly specialised wildlife. They also store carbon and rainwater in large amounts, providing climate and flood risk reduction benefits, as well as improved water quality downstream. There are clearly multiple benefits to turning the tide for our peaty pockets.
It has been said that a good place to start in conservation is to “stop doing bad things”. Just re-wetting peat stops its oxidation almost immediately, stopping CO2 emissions in their tracks. It also paves the way for habitat recovery. Peat forms slowly, at around 1cm depth a decade, so to build up a depth of peat to have noticeably increased carbon capture will not happen overnight. It won’t happen at all though if the conditions for peat-forming sphagnum mosses are not there, so this is the focus of the Partnership’s work.
Each of the partnership’s sites has a tailored approach to its restoration, with a range of factors taken into consideration for what techniques are best to apply where and how. Fundamentally though, it comes back to re-wetting these dried-out sites by holding water back through re-blocking historic drains and preventing further water loss by removing trees and scrub.
Agglestone Mire sundews © James Burland
Our partners have worked hard to make sure that the project will deliver real improvements in the short and long term. This has been a substantial piece of work for all involved and has only been possible thanks to that rarest of beasts: project development funding. The NCPGS operates in two phases: Discovery and Restoration. The Discovery funding supported partners, led by Dorset Wildlife Trust, to explore and assess the suitability of more than 80 Dorset sites to take forward to a potential two-year Restoration programme. Many were discounted because they could simply not be progressed within this short timeframe; others because the peat was too shallow or limited in its restorable extent to qualify – lots of Dorset’s peaty pockets are very small indeed. As the sites were winnowed through the funded development phase, eligible sites were assessed based on hydrology, ecology, archaeology, infrastructure constraints including flood risk, carbon-loss-reduction potential, and more. Comprehensive restoration plans were drawn up and approved by national experts and the relevant consents sought in preparation.
At time of writing, the Restoration phase is well underway having commenced in September 2023, with really exciting results being seen already from the first winter’s activity on National Trust sites on Purbeck and Forestry England sites in Ringwood Forest. Some sites have been cleared of trees and scrub to reveal the historic drains which will be blocked in the next year’s restoration work, other sites have been flailed to the ground to reduce the tussocky growth of Molinia grass and increase the chance of Sphagnum mosses re-gaining a foothold. Whilst much of this work was carried out by contractors with large machinery, volunteer group Friends of Uddens and Cannon Hill Woodlands has played an important role on one site, helping clear vegetation and prepare for the next stage of work. Elsewhere, partners were able to move straight on to the hydrological repairs, blocking gullies and ditches, reprofiling water pathways, holding water back in the landscape. No easy feat in one of the wettest winters on record, but it certainly provided instant evidence of the effectiveness of the interventions!
Holding water in the peat has two benefits – attenuating peak flows (thereby reducing their erosive power) which we’ve seen by the bucket load this winter, and keeping mires wet in the drier summer months, which we look forward to seeing later this year on the completed sites.
Greenlands peat dam in foreground heather bale peat dam © Sally Wallington
Having established a comprehensive baseline during the earlier Discovery phase, the partnership is continuing to monitor the restored sites over time to measure the effectiveness of the work and using the information to target future work on these sites where necessary.
Although all is seemingly quiet on all our sites through these spring and early summer months, there is much preparatory work happening off-site: lining up contractors, gaining final consents and making sure that appropriate mitigations for existing rare species are in place so that everything happens smoothly in the Autumn/winter. By late autumn, it will be ‘all systems go!’ with activity live or complete on all 16 sites, managed by our partners National Trust, Forestry England, Dorset Wildlife Trust, BCP Council, RSPB and the Holme Estate, with several sites’ delivery directly supported by the Catchment Partnership team.
For more information about any of the partnership’s sites, or the portfolio as a whole, contact project manager Grace Hervé at Dorset Wildlife Trust: gherve@dorsetwildlifetrust.org.uk
