The Glossop Moor Fire and the Case for Controlled Burning
- Rob Beeson
- Jun 29
- 3 min read
What happened on Tintwistle Moor
As the Daily Mail reported, late on Wednesday 24 June, Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service was called to a fire on Tintwistle Moor, near Glossop. Over the next day and a half it spread to around 200 hectares — roughly 500 acres — before crews contained it on the afternoon of Friday 26 June.
Six fire engines, specialist wildfire vehicles and a United Utilities helicopter were needed to bring it under control, with smoke visible for miles across the Peak District.
The cause has not been established. But the conditions that let it spread are not in doubt: weeks of dry weather during the UK's hottest June on record left the moorland vegetation primed to burn. BLOG EDIT: As of Monday 29 June crews were still working to extinguish the fire
Why fuel loads matter
A wildfire needs three things: heat, oxygen and fuel. Hot, dry weather supplies the first two, and a warming climate is making that weather more common. The third — the dead, dry vegetation that builds up across unmanaged moorland — is the one factor land managers can actually reduce.
For generations, gamekeepers and farmers have done exactly that through controlled "cool" burning: low-intensity fires set in cold, damp conditions to clear old heather.
Done properly, the fire removes the surface vegetation without burning into the peat below, and triggers fresh growth for grouse, sheep and ground-nesting birds.
Supporters of the practice argue it:
removes the dry vegetation that fuels summer wildfires;
is carried out in winter conditions when fire is easy to control;
creates firebreaks that slow or halt a wildfire's spread;
stimulates new growth that supports grazing and wildlife.
What the new rules changed
Under the Heather and Grass etc. Burning (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2025, in force since 30 September 2025, the government lowered the threshold for "deep peat" from 40cm to 30cm and extended the burning-licence regime across all Less Favoured Areas.
Defra's own figures put the area of deep peat now restricted at 676,628 hectares — up from 222,000, an area the size of Devon.
Ministers say the measure will improve air quality and help restore and "rewet" peatlands so they become naturally more resilient to fire. Rewetting degraded peat is a reasonable long-term goal. But it takes decades, and it does nothing to reduce the fuel that is sitting on the moor this summer.
Andrew Gilruth, Chief Executive of the Moorland Association, said the "core problem" is that farmers and gamekeepers have increasingly been stopped from reducing vegetation. "The fire on Tintwistle Moor is on land which the RSPB has rewilded," he said. "This has created huge amounts of tinder dry dead vegetation which catches fire very easily."
He was blunt about where responsibility lies. "If Andy Burnham wants to stop the north of England being scarred by wildfires," he added, "he needs to have a scorched-earth approach to such reckless behaviour."
A warning MPs have already heard
The concern is not confined to one fire or one organisation. Days before the Glossop blaze, veteran gamekeeper Richard Bailey told the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee that growing fuel loads were producing hotter, more dangerous fires, warning MPs that "it's only a matter of time before someone is getting killed".
A newly formed All-Party Parliamentary Group on wildfire prevention is now pressing the government to publish a national wildfire strategy as a matter of urgency.
The figures back the alarm. Official records show 2025 was the worst year on record for the area of UK land burned by wildfire — almost 48,000 hectares, far above the previous high of around 29,000 hectares set in 2019.
For land managers, the most telling failure is the licence system itself. The Country Land and Business Association (CLA) has called it so complex and slow as to be "unfit for purpose" — a process that, in practice, deters the very work that reduces wildfire risk. A regime that makes preventative burning harder, while peat restoration is still decades from delivering, leaves the moors carrying more fuel, not less.
Why this matters
The Glossop fire will be put out, the smoke will clear, and the inquiry into its cause will run its course. What will not change, unless policy does, is the volume of dry vegetation banked up across England's uplands, waiting for the next hot, dry spell.
Controlled burning is not the enemy of healthy peat. Done well, it is one of the few tools that can cut wildfire fuel in the here and now — and it has just been taken off the table across much of the uplands.
Restoring wetter peatland matters, but it is a project for the coming decades, not for this summer's heatwave. The Moorland Association's position is straightforward: give the people who know this land the means to manage it, before the next fire makes the argument for us.
