The Cutting Myth: Why Heather Cutting Failed to Stop the Snake Moors Wildfire
- Rob Beeson
- 3 hours ago
- 1 min read
A short video from last week’s wildfire on Snake Moors, courtesy of the Peak District Moorland Group.
It has been suggested that cutting will stop wildfires and prevent them from turning into landscape scale incidents, but as this video clearly shows, this is often untrue and as we experienced, can induce the burning of peat soils due to the smouldering process of burning cut trash.
This is a deep peat moorland that has had millions of pounds spent on it to pursue the dream of making it sustainable and resilient to wildfire.
The transition period has been suggested to take 50 years. Some moors have still not reached the target of being a “blanket bog wet soup” type moor after this time period - with the increase in wildfires and complexity of porous bedrock, we will never reach that holy grail.
We need to manage the surface fuel loads with all appropriate tools available.
