As for so many of us, 2020 was a challenging year for the Yorkshire Peat Partnership. Our restoration season - the time we can work on the moors - runs from November to March, working around the breeding bird and grouse shooting seasons. 

We had to adapt our working practices to ensure that everyone working on the vital project could safely continue. Despite difficulties, we worked on 3,113 hectares of peatland, which included:

• blocking 82.9 km of eroding grips - drainage dtiches - and gullies  to slow the flow of water off the hills
• re-shaping and planting 73.8 km of grips and gully edges
• planting 33 ha of bare peat with bog vegetation 
• planting 85,596 cotton grass plugs in bare peat
• planting 126,500 sphagnum moss plugs
• re-establishing sphagnum in 38 ha of existing damaged blanket bog vegetation

What's next?

The 2020/2021 season is now underway and we’ll bring you more news later in the year. Our work for the 2021/2022 season will include:

Yorkshire Water’s AMP7 programme, with match funding from the Environment Agency, will not only enable restoration work, but also fund development of further sites so that they are ready to go as funding becomes available. 

A generous grant from Garfield Weston Foundation means we can return to the one of most degraded blanket bogs in Yorkshire to look again at our restoration work there and ensure that it will continue to hold water and peat on the moor. 

A Countryside Stewardship programme will fund us to work with individual landowners to restore peatlands across the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors. 

As one of the groups working for the Pennine PeatLIFE programme, we will continue restoring areas of the Yorkshire Dales and Forest of Bowland. 

The Great North Bog

This is an ambitious peatland restoration initiative on a huge scale being developed by the Moors for the Future Partnership, North Pennines AONB Partnership and Yorkshire Peat Partnership.

The Great North Bog will bring together peatland restoration and conservation across nearly 7,000 square kilometres of northern England’s protected landscapes of which currently store 400 million tonnes of carbon. Funding is in place to help us plan out how the next 20 years could make a significant contribution to the UK’s climate and carbon sequestration targets.