‘The Start of the Healing Process’: The Vital Work to Restore Britain’s Peatlands

At one of the most remote spots in southern England, Al West skilfully tilts and rotates the bucket of a small digger, like a giant mechanical hand. He lifts turf, and pats it down gently on to the rich, dark brown peat beneath. Above him, the granite stack of Fur Tor looms above the vast, boggy, wild expanse of northern Dartmoor.

It is repetitive, delicate work, which West carries out with dexterity and care. Within a boundary of white flags, he takes from a borrow pit and fashions a peat embankment across each ditch and depression covering the land, to restore it to its natural smoothness and to stop the rainwater running off down the valley.

For West this is personal. His family have had common grazing rights on Dartmoor since 1904. In the early 1920s, his great-grandfather came to the same place where West works today to cut sods of peat, along with hundreds of others, before taking it back home for domestic heating.