The slow, muddy work of saving ancient bogs

Sarah smiles in the background are the rolling hills of the Isle of Man

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Sarah Hickey is part of a team which keeps nearly 20,000 acres of upland healthy

ByJosh CannIsle of Man

Published5 minutes ago

High up on a Manx hillside, Sarah Hickey effortlessly pushes a metre-long metal rod into the wet ground until it disappears almost to her hands.

"This is pretty deep here," she says, reading the markings on the probe. Beneath her boots is peat, built up over thousands of years and consisting of partially decayed plants and organic matter.

Hickey is the island's Peatland Officer and part of an Uplands team of just three, who, between them, manage about 8,000 hectares of the Island's hills.

Hickey's job is to find the parts of that landscape which have been damaged, and inject life into it.

Peat is partially decomposed vegetation that builds up in waterlogged ground over centuries, storing more carbon than any other soil on Earth.

"It's important to keep that carbon locked away and not released to the atmosphere," Hickey says.

Much of that carbon has stayed locked away, but not all of it. The island's uplands were largely stripped of trees by the 17th century, and with little timber left to burn, islanders turned to the hills for fuel instead.

Peat would be cut into blocks and left to dry; peat made a good, slow-burning fuel, and for generations it was what Manx households cooked on and heated their homes with.

The practice was banned in 2020, but the bare faces that cutting left behind are still collapsing and eroding today, washing sediment down into reservoirs.

A before and after - on the left is a collapsed black hole of ground and on the right is a grassy pond

Image source, Sarah Hickey/BBCImage caption,

One of the sites that has been repaired, which now hosts a plethora of wildlife

Repairs start with a digger light enough not to cause fresh damage, which pulls the bare peat back to a gentler slope and folds the vegetation over it.

What is left exposed is protected with bio logs, then held down under netting, which keeps the ground shaded and damp so new vegetation can take hold.

The real engineer of a healthy bog, experts say though, is sphagnum moss.

"It grows in peatland habitats, but it also creates them," Hickey says.

It holds huge amounts of water, slowing rain as it moves downhill, reducing flooding and filtering out sediment before it reaches the reservoir.

It is also, she says, more fire-resistant; peat in good condition can be up to 90% water, which is increasingly important as wildfires become more common during summer months.

A close-up shot of the complexity of sphagnm moss and different grasses

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Peatland stores more carbon than any other land-based habitat on Earth, Hickey says

It matters for wildlife too. Ground-nesting birds such as hen harriers rely on open, treeless bog, safe from predators that would otherwise perch and watch for prey, while the wet ground breeds the invertebrates chicks are fed on.

The reward can arrive fast. After installing coir logs on one site last year, Hickey and colleagues sat down for tea beside the new pools they had created.

"Straight away there were dragonflies in that pool laying eggs," she says. "It was amazing to see what a difference these little features are making."