Peatland restoration at Snaizeholme

Snaizeholme – A giant boost for nature in the Yorkshire Dales and the White Rose Forest.  

Peatland restoration in conjunction with Yorkshire Peat Partnership.  

Alec Pue, site manager with the Woodland Trust: “hi, welcome to Snaizeholme, a site owned and managed by the Woodland Trust. Here at Snaizeholme, we are looking at nature recovery at scale. We have 561 hectares in the Snaizeholme Valley here, and we're looking at nature recovery across a range of different habitats—from peatland restoration where we are here today, through to tree planting down in the valley. We have pasture restoration as well down in the valley bottom, looking at improving things for wading birds and the like. So yeah, a really exciting project. 

"Today, we're here on the peatland where we've just finished a round of restoration work in partnership with the Yorkshire Peat Partnership, who have helped us deliver the work out here. So yeah, a really exciting time with lots of changes happening."

Tessa Levens, project manager at Yorkshire Peat Partnership: “the peat starts forming due to wet conditions and the plants that grow there. Blanket bog itself blankets the hills, which is the type of peatland that this is. It's built up from layers and layers of partially decomposed vegetation. The main one is the sphagnum moss, which is wonderful stuff and would rot down under different conditions, but with it being peatland, which is waterlogged and acidic, it just doesn't decompose. So you end up getting layers and layers of vegetation building up, which forms the peat itself. 

"They are an incredibly rare type of habitat that supports loads of really rare and unique vegetation and the wildlife that comes with it. They're home to many different plants such as carnivorous sundew, sphagnum mosses, cotton grasses, and loads of different dwarf shrub species when they're in a healthy condition. But unfortunately, a lot of them in the UK especially are not, as probably over 80% are damaged to some degree by human activity. So it's really, really important that where we can, we will do some restoration work to try and improve the habitats and improve any damage and any erosion that's taken place over the years." 

Alec: “here at Snaizeholme, our peatland has various drainage ditches been dug into it from past land use. So part of the restoration is to block up some of them ditches; that keeps the water on the site and helps keep the peat wet and helps the formation of peat.” 

Tessa: “we use quite a wide variety of interventions with peatland restoration. Our favourite type is to use the peat itself, whether that's peat dams in some of the drainage channels or low peat bunds across the landscape which slow the flow of water generally. We also use timber or stone in more of the gullies where there's a different type of material in the base. It all works together to restore the whole landscape.

"This is a type of peat dam that we use to block up some of the drainage channels on a peatland, called a low peat dam. Often they are higher than the surface of the channel itself, but on occasion where it's wider and slower flowing anyway, we can use these low versions to slow the flow of water down the channel and capture any eroding peat sediment that's coming with that water, allowing it to settle out and hopefully make it stable enough for eventual revegetation - particularly with sphagnum mosses, which are one of the really good peat formers. We use peat where we can for the restoration work because it's a material that is here; it's on-site, so it makes it much cheaper and easier to get these interventions in place without having to bring materials in from elsewhere.

"On areas of bare peat like this, we use coir quite often, which does come from quite a distance away. It's coconut husk and a waste product, and often we're asked, you know, is it worth bringing it over all this way? But it's a really light product, so you can ship quite a lot over at the same time, and it's the best thing we've got at the moment to restore areas of bare peat in many cases, which otherwise are just going to keep eroding away and you lose all that carbon as that's happening.

"This is one of the coir logs that we use to revegetate areas of bare peat. It's made up of coconut husk which is stuffed into a netting and staked into the bare peat areas. What this does initially is start to slow the flow of any water across these areas of bare peat, which you can see over on that side, and then it can also protect the cells that we've formed by breaking these bare peat areas up from the wind action. It stabilises it enough for plants to be able to revegetate better than they otherwise would with just a slowly moving around area of bare peat. The plan for these areas is to put some plug plants in of cotton grasses and, in the wetter bits, some Sphagnum moss, which is really important as a peat-forming species, so it would be really good to get those establishing on these parts of the site.  

"This was what we call a peat hag, which is a vertical face of bare peat with overhanging vegetation usually. These are caused by the action of water and are kept eroding by wind, and they will erode down into the peat and also outwards to make gullies and other drainage channels wider and wider over time. What we need to do with these is to protect the bare peat using vegetation. This one has been reprofiled using an excavator and angled from vertical to about 33 degrees. This is covered up with the existing vegetation that is around the area anyway. This is the best way to do it because you've got the root system and this should survive; it instantly protects the bare peat and you can hardly see that there was anything here in the first place.

"This is one of the nature-for-climate funded monitoring plots which are being done over a longer period than we've actually been able to monitor the changes to peatlands before. They go in before any restoration work takes place so that we've got a baseline of what the water table and vegetation is prior to any restoration happening, and we'll hopefully be able to monitor these for many years to see what the fluctuations in water table are and any changes in vegetation.

"These are dip wells which we blow bubbles down to see where the water is in relation to the height of the ground, and we just listen for the sound of the bubbles and that tells us how deep it is using a cane and a ruler. We've just got these in the top which stop voles going down them, hiding from all the short-eared owls that are on this site. We also have an automatic data logger which is also monitoring the water table on-site like this, and that's doing it more frequently than we come to do the dip wells. On the other side of this plot, there's some canes set out and we do vegetation monitoring there. We've got the baseline to show what the vegetation was like prior to restoration, and we'd expect to see some changes and have more blanket bog species such as sphagnums and cotton grasses, which change over time as a response to the water table rising.

"Peatland restoration isn't just done in one go. Often there's complicated erosion and there may be areas that need improvement or bits that haven't quite reacted as we'd expect to the restoration intervention. So it's always good to have monitoring in place to see what we might need to come back and do in future, if there's ever any future funding for these schemes.” 

Alec: “the peat restoration work here we see is quite a vital part of the project at Snaizeholme. It links in really well with all the other restoration we're undertaking. Everything we're doing here relates somewhere with water, and obviously peatland restoration is a big part of that—capturing the water and keeping it on the peatland to help improve it.  

"Peatland is very important as a habitat in its own right, so getting that right is important for wildlife and for nature recovery, but also it's great for carbon capture. Once it's eroded and lost it takes an awful long time to regain it, so we want to make sure we don't lose anymore, and we also want to make sure that the peat itself is forming more peat with years to come.” 

Thank you. The Snaizeholme Estate was acquired by the Woodland Trust thanks to the generosity of our incredible individual supporters, charitable trusts and corporate partners.  

The peatland restoration work at Snaizeholme has been managed by Yorkshire Peat Partnership and funded by the Government’s Nature for Climate Peatland Grant Scheme, administered by Natural England, with match funding provided by B&Q.