'National Park' in name only

Protect the Wild planning campaign to highlight state of Peak District National Park

On Sunday 14 April a group of activists gathered at Belvoir Castle, the ancestral home of David Manners, the 11th Duke of Rutland. They were calling on him to put an end to heather burning on his Moscar estate. A grouse shoot within the Peak District National Park, Moscar has become a national symbol of the public fight against grouse shooting and moorland burning. It borders another enormous grouse shooting estate owned by the Duke of Westminster.

Every year large patches of moorland are burned on shooting estates like Moscar to create a mosaic of habitats for grouse. Protesters say these 'highly damaging land management practices' are responsible for 'reduced air quality, a decrease in biodiversity and increased flood risks'.

The protest group in the image above had travelled from Sheffield, a city heavily impacted by moorland burning in the Peak District National Park. Smoke pollution puts citizens’ health at risk, especially the most vulnerable.

Political support to stop the burn

The Mayor of South Yorkshire, Oliver Coppard, has repeatedly called for open meetings with the Duke of Rutland to discuss moorland burning amid fury over the deliberate fires which blanketed Sheffield in smoke in October last year.

Sheffield Labour councillor Minesh Parekh has said,

'I’m proud to represent a council, Sheffield, that has publicly called for a total ban on moorland burning, and to work alongside Sheffield Hallam MP Olivia Blake, who has led the charge to protect and restore peatlands in her constituency and beyond'.

Tom Hunt, the Labour leader of Sheffield City Council, has also written to the government calling for a complete ban on the 'ecologically damaging and pollution-causing practice of moorland burning'.

"We all know that air pollution kills and that air pollution from fires has an immediate impact on hospital admissions and A&E attendances," he wrote.

"We all know that the real impact of air pollution is in heart attacks and strokes, and increasingly lung cancer is linked to air pollution."

"The burning of heather, simply speaking, makes it harder for Sheffield to achieve its air quality improvement ambitions, its climate and net zero ambitions."

Speaking at the protest itself, Lewis, an environmental activist, neatly summarised the way many of us (Protect the Wild included) view grouse shooting and the wholly inadequate response of the government to the biodiversity and climate crises:

"The protest isn't just about local issues; it’s highlighting the wider impacts such land management has on our biodiversity and climate. Our government needs to radically overhaul its environmental policies, dismantle the outdated privileges that allow such destruction, and enforce a ban on harmful land uses that threaten our ecosystems. This requires immediate action to stop subsidizing destructive practices and instead invest in restoring and preserving our natural landscapes for public benefit and environmental resilience."

Moscar Estate 09 October 2023. Image Bob Berzins

National Park in name only

The 6000-acre Moscar Estate is an SSSi and part of the 1424 sq km/ 550 sq mile Peak District National Park which sits in the centre of England reaching into Derbyshire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, South & West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester.

In August last year Protect the Wild’s Charlie Moores, a lifelong birder, spoke at a protest walk on Moscar, saying at the time that:

I know when I'm in an area full of wildlife and when I'm not. In two hours I saw just four bird species - remarkably that didn't include a Red Grouse, which appears to be having another bad year in the Peak District. There were no Skylarks, no Meadow Pipits, no Stonechats. No corvids of any species. A single Kestrel (a vole eater and no danger to grouse chicks) was the sole representative of the suite of raptors that an SSSi like Moscar should be blessed with.

That observation corroborated what many of us already know: shooting estates - and the Peak District NP itself - are anything but the havens for wildlife that they try to portray themselves as. Raptor persecution is a particular problem. 56 out of 62 incidents of crimes against birds of prey reported in National Parks took place in just three of them: the Peak District, the North York Moors and the Yorkshire Dales - all three are predominantly managed for grouse shooting.

A recent ‘Health Check’ report by the Campaign for National Parks (CNP) confirmed that malaise and mismanagement runs through the entire national park system.

Graphics Campaign for National Parks

CNP stated that “only 6% of the total land area of National Park [ie across all the national parks] is currently managed effectively for nature”. That has to change.

As we have written previously, even though it is (legally) the planning authority for the park, the Peak District National Park Authority itself owns an almost irrelevant 4% of the land within the National Park. While the National Trust owns another 11%, much of the Peak District is owned, managed, burnt, and shot over by wealthy landowners like the Duke of Rutland and Sir Philip Naylor-Leyland (the latter lives in a stately home near Peterborough and runs the Fitzwilliam Hunt) - men who live far away from the smoke and air pollution that streams off their land into cities like Sheffield.

Campaign announcement coming soon

Protect the Wild is determined to highlight the state of the Peak District National Park and support protest movements like ‘Rewild Our Moors’. We will be launching a new campaign this summer with a focus on grouse shooting, trapping and snaring, raptor persecution, moorland burning, and the staggeringly depleted biodiversity on the shooting estates that make up so much of this ‘national park’.

We are pulling our plans together at the moment and will be writing more in the months to come.

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