Give Peat a Chance
Give Peat a Chance tells the story of Yorkshire’s peatlands.
Heritage, ecosystem, carbon sink and natural flood defence.
Yorkshire Peat Partnership is restoring blanket bog across North Yorkshire. Our goal is, where needed, to rewet, replant and restore all of Yorkshire’s upland peatlands by March 2035.
Yorkshire’s peatlands are remote and often overlooked. Through art, information and intervention, we can all work to understand and protect these important habitats.


Healthy blanket bog rich in brightly coloured sphagnum mosses. Credit: Jenny Sharman
What’s so special about peatlands?
What are peatlands and how do they form?
In Yorkshire, the development of blanket bog began around 5,000-6,000 years ago, as the climate became wetter and warmer. It is generally found over bedrock in places where rainfall exceeds the loss of water through evaporation and plant transpiration, leading to near-constant saturation. These conditions favour the growth of bog-mosses and cottongrasses, which do not break down when they die but slowly accumulate as peat.
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Sphagnum. Credit: Jenny Sharman
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Sundew. Credit: Lizzie Shepherd
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Hare’s Tail Cottongrass. Credit: Tessa Levens
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Curlew. Credit: Damian Waters
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Short-eared owl. Credit: Pam Jones
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Adder. Credit: Danny Green
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Common lizard. Credit: Ceri Katz
What’s so special about peatlands?
A unique habitat
Peatlands are home to some amazing and beautiful wildlife: including many species of sphagnum moss, the carnivorous sundew plant, hare’s tail cottongrass, curlew, short eared owl, adder and common lizard.

Saturated blanket bogs brim with mosses and bog pools. Credit: Lizzie Shepherd
What’s so special about peatlands?
A vital carbon store
Peatlands are impressive carbon stores and therefore important in the fight against climate change. As of April 2022, blanket bog across the Yorkshire Dales and Nidderdale stores 35 million tonnes of carbon. We need to keep the peat wet to keep that carbon locked up.

Water quality is sampled across many of our sites. Credit: Jenny Sharman
What’s so special about peatlands?
Reducing flooding and improving water quality
Healthy peatlands help to filter water before it reaches our reservoirs, reducing the costs of processing our drinking water.
They also play a vital role in reducing flooding. Surface roughness of bog vegetation slows the flow of water across the fell tops helping to manage flood risk downstream.
What's so special about peat?
Hester Cox reimagines the way artists and thinkers have explored peat bogs for centuries. Her intricate engravings catalogue the preciousness and diversity of these ecosystems.
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Aerial photography shows the damage caused by gripping and gullying. Credit: Alistair Lockett
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Hags expose bare peat. Credit: Jenny Sharman
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Grips drain water from the uplands. Credit: Tessa Levens
How have they been used and damaged?
The effect of draining peatlands for agriculture
In the 50s and 60s, the Government paid land managers to drain blanket bog to improve the land for sheep grazing
Narrow drainage channels called ‘grips’ were dug to drain water from the fells.
Drying out the peatlands killed off the plants that live on the surface of the peat, exposing it to erosion by wind and rain.
This led to formation of deep channels (known as gullies), and steep faces of bare peat (hags), driving the formation of areas of bare peat leading into a vicious cycle of further erosion.

Ribblesdale peat cutting spade
How have they been used and damaged?
A part of the identity of the Yorkshire Dales and its people
For centuries, peat was the main fuel used in the Yorkshire Dales. It was generally cut after lambing, dried and stacked over the summer, and carted down for use after haytime. The job involved the whole family- men, women and children all worked together to gather the peat.
Different tools were used in each Dale, and were made to be right- or left-handed, depending on the wielder.
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Maps provide detail on how water is moving across a given restoration site and where it is driving erosion; this enables us to target our interventions where they will have the most impact. Credit: Yorkshire Peat Partnership
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Sites are surveyed using a range of methods, but much is done on foot with hand-held GPS mapping tools. Credit: Caitlin Greenwood
How is Yorkshire Peat Partnership repairing and restoring these habitats?
The tools of our trade
Planning our approach to restoring damaged blanket bogs starts with site surveys. We conduct both desk-based and field surveys. Aerial photos used in our surveys are often provided by our in-house UAV pilots. Using handheld GPS mappers, we categorise all the features of a site, including vegetation, damage and peat depths. Yorkshire Peat Partnership’s expanding team has already surveyed nearly 59,800 hectares using these methods.
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Helicopters are used to drop dam materials in place. Credit: Dave Higgins
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Specially adapted diggers reprofile bare peat to encourage vegetation to grow. Credit: Matthew Roberts
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Coir dams criss-cross a badly damaged site. Credit: Aaron de Raat
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Bog vegetation is planted by hand on areas of bare peat. Credit: Ben Queenborough
How is Yorkshire Peat Partnership repairing and restoring these habitats?
Transforming the landscape
Restoring damaged blanket bogs focuses on interventions that reduce the loss of water and through blocking drainage channels and re-establishing key vegetation species that play a vital role in holding water in the peatlands and covering bare peat.
Yorkshire Peat Partnership works with specialists to block grips and gullies with peat, coir, wood and stone dams, and plant sphagnum mosses and cottongrasses.
Restore
For Bev Parker, years of working as the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority’s Rights of Way officer meant she encountered blanket bog regularly and was, in her own words, ‘intrigued by its remoteness, the brooding solitude’. Now she depicts these landscapes using innovative painting techniques that mimic the movement of water within and across them and cleverly replicate the interventions that Yorkshire Peat Partnership uses to support the retention of water in these sites.

The exhibition contributors on opening night
Thank you!
The Folly and Yorkshire Peat Partnership would like to acknowledge support from the Dales Countryside Museum and the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority Sustainable Development Fund.
The Development Fund is open to individuals, businesses, community groups or voluntary sector bodies. It provides an accessible source of money for a range of projects that result in positive benefits for the National Park’s environment, economy and communities, while enhancing and conserving local culture, wildlife and landscape.