Peaknaze: conservation and common sense
The Peak District, with its limestone dales, wild heather moorland and dark, forbidding, gritstone crags, is an oasis of outstanding natural beauty, surrounded by some of the biggest towns, cities and conurbations in the country. An estimated 20 million people live within an hour’s drive of the Peak District and, since 1951, when it became the first UK National Park, around 13.25 million people descend on the area annually to enjoy the spectacular topography. The sheer volume of humanity, particularly during the spring and summer, creates a unique set of challenges for moorland managers and keepers on the 17 grouse moors in the Dark Peaks, not least of which is the ever-increasing risk of wildfire.
Moorland wildfires, invariably started by human negligence, cause immense damage to swathes of internationally important landscape and are catastrophic to wildlife – there is nothing more tragic than finding the broken eggs of groundnesting birds after a moor fire – and takes years for the unique habitat to recover. In 1996, after smoke from a spate of Peak District fires
