Thousands of holes are appearing in the Pennine hills, as part of efforts to improve carbon storage by restoring damaged peatland.
Peat itself is carbon rich and so as it grows it will help to capture the CO₂ that is produced by industrial fossil fuel use that is warming the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, damaged or drained peatlands turn into a carbon source, releasing greenhouses gases themselves. About 15% of the world’s peatlands have been drained, making these kind of restoration projects essential.
But now a new project is attempting to bring these wetlands back to life. On Holcombe Moor in the West Pennines, 3,000 bunds were created in 2021, with a further 700 in 2024 as part of Natural England’s Nature for Climate Peatland Grant Scheme. Improvements are already starting to be seen.
What’s the history here?
The hills of the West Pennines are no stranger to holes, with a long history of lead and coal mining stretching back to the Roman period.
Coal fired the mills nearby during the industrial revolution in cities such as Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield. Smoke drifted back to the hills, carrying the heavy metal impurities of lead and arsenic from coal burning.
The industrial legacy remains visible in the elevated concentrations of heavy metals near the soil surface, which made it difficult for most plants to survive. Areas were stripped of all vegetation, leaving expanses of exposed soil. In the most affected places, these erosional gullies cut deep into the surface, turning places like Kinder Scout into a moonscape.
What was exposed and eroded so quickly had taken over 8,000 years to form. Much of the Pennines are covered in blanket peatland, a type of bog made through the slow accumulation of partially decayed plant matter (the type of soil we call peat).
The conditions for peat to form require a delicate balance, with the water table maintained high enough to limit the decomposition of plant matter, while still allowing plants to grow. Not just any plant can tolerate these harsh growing conditions. One species is truly specialised to bog life and forms the main building block of peat itself – Sphagnum.
Adam Johnston, CC BY-SA
Finding a super moss
Sphagnum moss is the key ecosystem engineer in peatlands, holding up to 20 times its weight in water to maintain the saturated conditions needed for its growth.
When in a healthy state, new Sphagnum grows up through the older moss, raising the water table with it to leave the older moss submerged, partially decayed, which forms the peat itself. Bogs grow only millimetres per year, but over millennia this can build several metres of peat.
The organic nature of peat means it is carbon rich, so much so that UK peatlands store over 3 billion tonnes of carbon, around ten times more than all UK woodland carbon stocks.
Restored wetlands could also help protect the area from wildfires at the UK starts to see more extreme temperatures.
Adam Johnston., CC BY-SA
Human pressure and pollution
With human pressures, including past industrial pollution, bog growth has been disrupted. Sphagnum has disappeared from these peatlands.
Now, peatland restoration efforts are under way. From the early 2000s organisations including Moors for the Future Partnership have spent decades blocking gullies to raise water tables, reseeding bare peat and planting Sphagnum moss, transforming the worst affected peatlands from dark moonscapes to vibrant green moss-scapes.
Though blocking erosional gullies with stone or timber dams has proven successful in deeply eroded peat, restoring flatter moorland plateaux presents a different set of challenges. Namely, how to restore the wet conditions required to encourage more Sphagnum moss to grow. However, this hasn’t stopped restoration organisations from trying a novel restoration method which might work to restore flatter peatlands.
Five years on from the start of the project, the original bunds are covered with grasses and many pools are now brimming with Sphagnum moss, looking more like natural bog pools.
Scallop bunds are crescent-shaped pools, created by digging shallow scrapes in the peat surface using special low impact excavators. The aim is to capture surface water which would otherwise run quickly off the hill after rainfall. The water stored in bund pools helps to maintain wetter conditions at the bog surface for Sphagnum moss to re-establish and grow on moorland plateaus.
The National Trust, in partnership with the University of Manchester, is undertaking long-term research to understand the potential for bunds as a peatland restoration method.
The 2025 drought followed one of the driest springs in England for over 100 years.
It provided the first test of extreme weather in this peat bund experiment. Preliminary monitoring during the 2025 drought suggests bunded areas remained wetter for longer than unrestored peat, helping to maintain wetter conditions near the peat surface for longer – the conditions required to support Sphagnum growth.
The excavator machines up on the hills today don’t signal a return to the industrial past, but an attempt to restore the damage it left behind.
Adam Johnston has received funding from charities delivering peatland restoration
