A vast, brown, wet desert surrounds me. The low pool-pocked hills of Scotland’s Flow Country stretch to the horizon, seemingly endless moorland with no houses or buildings. Grass stalks tremble in a stiff cold wind from the north-west. This is an almost wilfully monotonous landscape, sitting in the chilly top right-hand corner of the UK: no soaring crags, sparkling lochs or pretty woodland here.
Bleak though it seems, this is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s the world’s only such site based on peatland, and its status means it’s judged to be as environmentally important as Africa’s Serengeti and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
- The best UK UNESCO World Heritage sites to visit for unforgettable days out
- What exactly is peat – and why is it so important?
I’m here to find out what makes it so special for a BBC Radio 4 Farming Today programme, and quickly realise the best way past that first bleak impression is to get up close to the bog, get your feet wet, smell the tang of peaty vegetation, splash in the pools and go down on your knees to see the sparkling sphagnum moss at the heart of this unique ecosystem.
It’s Europe’s largest blanket bog and the most complete example of such a habitat in the world, with peat up to 10m deep, making it a huge carbon store. The World Heritage Site extends to 730 square miles in several separate blocs, and there’s as much peatland again around the edges.
Achieving World Heritage status
World Heritage status was awarded in July 2024 after a prolonged bid process by a group made up of conservationists, Government agencies and locals. Its new status has already won attention for this place of low-key marvels, with tourist operators seeing visitors staying longer, coming off the popular, hurried North Coast 500 driving route around its edges to probe the soggy wonders. What do they see and where? And why is it worth preserving?
“The peat is like a vast cloak placed over the land,” says artist Jean Gillespie from Fife. She’s one of those sucked in by the bog, a peat enthusiast who has recorded the creaking, bubbling sound of the dark pools on an underwater microphone, and made strange, patterned images with its fibrous material. “It’s a kind of place where you feel you can breathe again.”
We’re at the Forsinard National Nature Reserve at the heart of the heritage site, the best place to start when getting to know the Flows. The locals pronounce it to rhyme with ‘blouse’, and it’s from the Norse for bog. Gillespie’s artistic eye picks out individual colours in the vegetation. “You get reds and oranges, and all sorts of ochres, and really quite bright yellows,” which give the lie to the overall brown impression. “It’s anything but dull,” she says.
Peatland wildlife
Milly Revill-Hayward of RSPB Scotland, which manages the reserve, takes us along a boardwalk to an observation tower set amid bog pools. Such pool systems are a good indicator the peat-bog here is in good condition.
There are three species of heather; grasses and orchids; and the perky bogbean, its slim stems protruding from dark pools. In summer, says Revill-Hayward, the place is alive with dragonflies and other insects, and flowers such as yellow bog asphodel. In late autumn when we visit, things are more muted. But she points to a tiny carnivorous sundew, with deep red foliage. “The environment is so nutrient-poor the plant gets nutrients from insects,” she explains. “It has a sticky, glistening dew. The insects think they’re coming for a nice drink but then they can’t escape.”
Dead insects to digest are in demand: there are three species of sundew here, plus another insectivore, common butterwort, which uses purple flowers to attract insects and sticky leaves to trap them.
I spend the night at a former hunting lodge at Forsinard, and at first light hear the roar of rutting stags. There are red and roe deer here, otters and water voles love the watery environment, and the bird life is spectacular, with birds migrating north from Africa and south from Scandinavia to breed and feed. The songs of the golden plover and the skylark are common, as is the plaintive cry of the curlew. Red and black-throated divers breed on lochs at the Flow edges, and birds of prey such as hen harriers stalk the skies.
Why is peat so important?
Perhaps more important than all the life here, however, is the dead vegetation piled up to form the deep, brown-black peat. Revill-Hayward grabs a handful of sphagnum moss and squeezes it out, reducing its volume by more than three-quarters. This is what peat is made of, growing and dying but unable to decay in the wet, oxygen-starved environment, building up at a rate of 1mm a year since the last Ice Age.
There are 29 species of sphagnum here, with three key ones: cupsidatum, favouring the wettest places; capillifolium, with dense clumps like a miniature red cauliflower; and papillosum, most adaptable because of its tolerance of drying. The dead mosses form what is now the UK’s biggest carbon store, 400 million tonnes, more than in all the UK’s woodlands combined, and around 100 years’ worth of the UK’s fossil fuel emissions.
Undoing the past
The World Heritage Site includes the best-preserved bogland but even in areas such as the Forsinard reserve there’s been harm done over the years. Local people have always cut peat for fuel and this has in the past been scaled up to commercial extraction, but perhaps the most egregious damage came as a result of Government policy.
In the 1950s and 1960s grants were paid to landowners to dig “grips” – drainage channels – to dry the peat and improve the sheep grazing. From the 1980s until 1993 a tax incentive drew in wealthy investors – including DJ Terry Wogan, singers Phil Collins and Cliff Richard and snooker’s Steve Davis – to pay for vast conifer plantations. But this wrecked habitat and released many tonnes of carbon from the drying peat; now, ironically, the Scottish Government pays grants to remove trees and block the ditches.
Contractor Gary MacKay has a fleet of wide-tracked lightweight diggers that can be driven on to the peat to carry out the restoration without causing damage. He wryly points out his father was involved in ploughing the peat for trees. On a tree-clearance site he whacks his digger shovel onto the ground and I feel a slow woozy wobble, even though I’m 15 metres away. “It’s just like a giant wet sponge,” he says.
High on the eastern edge of the reserve, RSPB Scotland staffer Anna Grozelier – a Parisian who’s fallen in love with the peatland – shows me the damage done by tree-planting and how it’s undone. The forestry work involved ploughing the peat, creating furrows and ridges, atop which trees were planted. The furrows acted as multiple drainage ditches. On one ridge where the forest still stands, we see exposed, dried peat: it’s a sickly pale grey instead of rich and dark. To undo the damage, trees are felled, then the ridge that held them is pushed back into the furrow, with the wide-tracked digger smoothing over it.
From a distance, it’s impossible to distinguish the restored areas from the pristine bog, although close up, the dried brash from felled trees is visible, now slipping down into the peat. The water table rapidly rises where restoration has been done, bringing back a satisfying squelch. “The drying releases carbon but the restoration work helps restart the natural cycle of absorbing it again,” explains Grozelier.
Attracting tourists
The group that bid for World Heritage status, the Flow Country Partnership, now helps landowners to win Government grants and private funds for peatland restoration, creating work for local contractors such as MacKay. It’s hoped cash from investors paying a premium for carbon credits from the UNESCO site can be reinvested in community projects.
But not everyone here is convinced World Heritage status is a good thing. Sandy Murray is a crofter – a type of small farming tenancy – in Halladale, at the heart of the Flows north of Forsinard. Murray fears the new status might mean constraints on grazing and affect building and development. “We already had all these designations before such as Site of Special Scientific Interest and Special Area of Conservation,” he says. “This will just be another layer of bureaucracy to make working here harder.”
Those behind the World Heritage bid point out that though the status will be a consideration for council planners, those earlier designations already cover the majority of the new World Heritage Site and the status will not impose greater constraints in those places. Even Murray admits the new status might help his holiday bunkhouse business.
The World Heritage Site itself is likely to expand as more peatland is restored to good order, and there will be opportunities in tourism, giving a boost to the local economy.
The North Coast 500 road, which runs along the north coast and then down the eastern edge of the Flows, has developed a reputation for campers leaving damage and litter, while other Scottish sites such as Skye’s Fairy Pools are being loved to death by the sheer volume of tourists. But the Flows themselves are unlikely to be overwhelmed by visitors: this landscape of hidden treasures takes time to know, and has few Instagram opportunities likely to draw mass visitors in search of a swift selfie.
Tourist development will focus on going slow, learning about peat and wildlife, and ensuring access without damage. Only those who stay for a few days, see the bog close up, get into the landscape and talk to people who are part of it will reap the full rewards of this magical place.
Discover more incredible places around the UK
- Guide to Global Geoparks in the UK
- St Kilda: A UNESCO World Heritage gem with Europe's largest seabird colony
- Step into a world of Vikings, Normans and clan chieftains with these must-visit coastal castles
- This ‘Scottish Pompeii’ was built before the Egyptian pyramids – discover Britain’s best archaeological finds
- Giant's Causeway: Northern Ireland's iconic UNESCO World Heritage Site and geological wonder
Top image: aerial view of Scotland's Flow Country. Credit: Getty
