For peat to blanket hills, a globally weird climate is required. One where winters are not so different from summers; where it rarely freezes; and above all, rains on most days. Only on our western Atlantic islands do we have weather that miserable and yet it creates so much beauty – from the dripping mosses of our British rainforests to the multi-coloured sphagnum carpets of our blanket bogs. The walking group were transfixed and delighted – for they were on the IUCN-UK Peatland Conference. 

To explain that we need to go back a bit and I’ll take you back to my first meeting about conserving British peatlands at the University of Southampton in 1992. An ecologist from the Nature Conservancy Council, called Richard Lindsay, set out a trajectory for our lowland raised bogs (another type of peatland that is rare in Britain but a bit more common around the world). That trajectory showed the whole habitat would be completely destroyed by 2020 given the then rate of destruction. He called peatlands a Cinderella habitat – overlooked, under-appreciated and misunderstood.  

The battle to get Cinderella to the ball had started with the development of the peatland campaign in 1990. The first objective was to secure a better future for Britain’s biggest raised bogs – Thorne and Hatfield Moors in South Yorkshire that were being ripped apart by peat mining for gro-bags, despite Site of Special Scientific Interest designation and protection. 

Whip forward to 2009, and Cinderella had inched towards the kitchen door. Thorne and Hatfield Moor had been saved from further peat extraction, and the long process of peatland restoration had begun. All across the country, some of the more special sites were having their drains blocked; sales of peat had fallen as peat alternatives were marketed; and on the hills, Moors for the Future was pioneering landscape scale peatland restoration in the Peak District National Park.  

This was great progress but we were hampered by misinformation, poor science, very little government support beyond protected areas and, if we were honest, we – the peatland community of practitioners, policy makers and researchers – were completely disjointed.  

Without us coming together, Cinderella glad-rags were an illusion. That multi-coloured moss dress might as well remain lost in our shifting baseline acceptance of burnt-out moors and dried out bogs. 

So a group of us peat-niks formed the IUCN-UK peatland programme, generously funded by the Peter De Haan Charitable Trust. Our aim was to promote the immense benefits of healthy peatlands, bust the myths, promote real-world research, advocate for funding to restore peatlands and, above all, bring the peatland community together into a coherent whole.

We ran our first peatland community conference at Durham University in 2010, with plenty of socialising – a poster-session lubricated by a specially produced beer, a ceilidh and field trips alongside the usual mix of talks across restoration practice, policy and research. Fifteen years on, we are on our 15^th IUCN-UK Peatlands Conference – this time in Derry-Londonderry. 

So, did Cinderella make it to the ball? The unequivocal answer has to be yes and especially so on our hills where the pioneering work of Moors for the Future has been emulated with peatland restoration partnerships across Northern and South West England, in Wales, in Northern Ireland whilst in Scotland, NatureScot established Peatland Action.    

Many hundreds of thousands of hectares of peatlands are in a process of restoration. And in England, after years of campaigning, the Government finally ensured that burning of peatlands over 30cm deep would more or less end by extending licencing to all of England’s peatlands. In the lowlands, a start has been made with amazing projects led by the Wildlife Trusts in Cambridgeshire (the Great Fen), Lancashire (the carbon fields) and Cumbria. 

To understand how that happened, we can go back to the 1990s again and examine a short paper titled The Global Status of Peatlands and Their Role in the Carbon Cycle. This showed that globally peatlands contained twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests on just 3% of the land surface (cf. 20% for forests) – it was a staggering revelation. 

The world had a natural carbon capture and storage (CCS) system, that was now so degraded it released carbon (a lot of it) to the atmosphere rather than took it out. By restoring just a small part of the global land surface back to nature, we could reinvigorate this natural CCS system – surely the low hanging fruit of climate change mitigation and adaptation. 

It gets better. The Northern Ireland conference theme was water – because peatland rewetting not only restores peat formation (to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and lay it down in the peat) but also improves water quality by reducing carbon in freshwaters. When 70% of Britain’s drinking waters come from catchments with peatlands, this is really important. And, restoration reduces the flashiness of streams (by increasing surface hydrological roughness as the hummock-hollow pattern of a natural peatland reforms) and so protects downstream communities from flooding.  Peatlands are sometimes called a super-hero habitat. 

Partnerships rather than division, evidence rather than anecdote and building communities of practice and place are the hallmarks of the IUCN-UK peatland programme, the UK peatland partnerships, the peatland research community and our policy colleagues in the four devolved Governments of the UK. 

There is much work to be done: we need to ban peat sales; ensure the voluntary carbon markets work properly in the UK to blend private and public finance together to restore and look after peatlands; and ensure an equitable distribution of benefits between landowners, tenants and the consumers of the many benefits of restored peatlands.  

The conference closed with a tribute to someone who had done so much for peatland conservation, including leading the charge to save the Scottish Flow Country from afforestation with exotic conifers. The first Lindsay Prize was awarded to, of course, the godfather of peatland restoration – Richard Lindsay – the same person that enthused me all those years ago. 

At the conference, the now traditional ceilidh was met with effervescent wild enthusiasm. Cinderella’s multi-coloured sphagnum dress spins ever-wilder.