When up on The Roaches you get those stunning autumn days where you can see for miles and those days when the moorland is cloaked in a mysterious blanket of mist and mizzle.

It was just one of these murky days when our volunteers headed out to plant the last of the sphagnum moss plugs with the volunteer team from Moors for the Future Partnership and the Peak Park Conservation (PPCV). Together they planted a whopping 4,400 plugs! Thanks to these amazing volunteers for giving up their time to help restore this blanket bog.

Over the past six years we’ve been working with partners to plant masses of this marvellous moss, restoring bare peat and areas which were burnt by the fire back in 2018 that haven't yet revegetated.

During the last year over 65,000 sphagnum plugs have been planted in total. Combined with previous planting efforts this totals an impressive 687m2 (27.5 hectares) of sphagnum.

A marvellous moss

Did you know that sphagnum moss is essential to forming peat, which accumulates at about 1mm per year? It’s a key component of blanket bogs and can hold up to 20 times its weight in water! 

Sphagnum moss is a very special type of moss which is only found in wet acidic areas such as peatlands, in fact it creates the peat itself. Apart from a few open water bog pools, a healthy peatland will be covered in a carpet of sphagnum mosses. This will feature numerous different varieties of sphagnum mixed in with other specialist peatland plants (listed below). The combination of this dense carpet of vegetation and the acidic water-logged conditions means that as the top layer of plants grow, the lower layers become effectively ‘pickled’ (in fact bog water is as acidic as the vinegar in a jar of pickled onions!). This means that the vegetation only partially decomposes. Over time this then becomes compressed and forms peat.

Other key plants

As if that wasn’t impressive enough, the team have also planted over 30,000 plug plants of other staple moorland species. These include common cotton grass, bilberry, cross-leaved heath, cowberry, hare’s-tail cotton grass, cowberry and bell heather.

Not only does healthy blanket bog lock in tonnes of carbon, it also slows the flow of water runoff and reduces the amount of rainwater entering streams and rivers in nearby towns and villages. 

The Moors for the Future Partnership works across the South Pennine Moors Special Area of Conservation and the West Pennine Moors Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).

How is this work helping with climate change?

Peatlands are our largest land habitat carbon store. Whilst they only cover between three-four per cent of the world’s surface, they store a third of all soil carbon – that’s twice as much as rainforests!

In the UK, peatlands only cover about 12 per cent of our land surface, but store as much carbon as the forests of the UK, France and Germany combined. And the amazing thing about peatlands is that as they continually form peat they are able to sequester (absorb) even more carbon from the atmosphere, making them a vital natural resource in our fight against the climate emergency.

However, as soon as a peatland is damaged or degraded in any way all of that stored carbon is released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Scarily at least four per cent of all UK greenhouse gas emissions come from degraded peatlands, a massive number when you think that aviation accounts for approximately seven per cent of emissions.