An enormous fire near Dovestone Reservoir in Oldham has been burning since 11 July. Billowing black smoke can be seen – and inhaled – for miles around. Helicopters, fire crews and volunteers have been working the lines on blackened hillsides in conditions that are fast becoming routine in Britain. Our uplands are experiencing more frequent and more severe wildfires than they have for decades. This year’s tally, already exceeding 21,000 hectares, follows the record-breaking fire season of 2025. Sheep farming representatives and grouse shooting interests insist that rewilding is to blame: fewer sheep, more scrub and a dangerous build-up of fuel. Yet the evidence increasingly points in the opposite direction. It is by recreating wetter, wilder upland landscapes that we are most likely to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire.

The question is whether policymakers have the courage to challenge long-standing assumptions

The question is whether policymakers have the courage to challenge long-standing assumptions

The single most effective thing we can do to reduce the prevalence of wildfire is to restore the wet upland landscapes that earlier generations knew so well. The poet John Clare described the blanket bogs that once cloaked Britain’s hills as ‘the moors’ rude desolate and spungy lap’. Those vast peatlands acted as giant natural sponges, storing water throughout the year and making fire far less likely. Today, restoring them is the central recommendation of the IUCN UK Peatland Programme.

Centuries of drainage, carried out to replace living bog with grasses and heather suitable for grazing sheep, have left our once-vast peatlands desiccated and dominated by an almost continuous carpet of flammable heather and purple moor-grass. When fire catches on these dried-out hills it does not merely race across the surface. It burns down into the peat itself, creating some of the most destructive and difficult-to-extinguish wildfires Britain experiences. Blocking drainage ditches and restoring natural hydrology raises the water table remarkably quickly, slowing heather growth, encouraging sphagnum moss........

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