Rewinding history

With a clever combination of drain blocking and grazing, James Mawle has reversed the fortunes of the river and heather moors on his family farm, writes Joe Dimbleby

- JOE DIMBLEBY

The English uplands are the source of a large proportion of the nation’s drinking water, and James Mawle’s family farm, Covered in North Yorkshire, contributes to that vital supply. They have also demonstrated how good grouse management, balanced with farming, can help to deliver clean water and mitigate the risk of flooding in towns downstream.

By holding back rainfall on the hills, the flood peak, which is the large body of water that does the damage, can be reduced. Good water management also improves the moor’s capacity for capturing carbon. Carbon-storing peat is formed when vegetation decays in a wet environment, but when peat dries out, it triggers bacterial processes that release CO² as a greenhouse gas. This dry peat is prone to erosion, with rains washing it into the rivers and coloring them brown. Once it has tainted the rivers, the Dissolved Organic Carbon (DOC) is difficult and expensive for water companies to remove, but keeping the peat wet can help avoid this process.

Many of the benefits of rewetting moorland can be achieved by blocking up the open ditches or ‘grips’ that were dug after WWII to increase agricultural production. Government funding to encourage farmers to drain the peat in this way continued until the 1980s. Grouse moor managers are often blamed for draining the uplands, but the boom in a grouse shooting between 1880 and 1940 proves large numbers of birds were present without any drainage. James said: “Anyone who tells you these moors was drained for grouse is not clear on their facts. There is no advantage in drying out the ground and if grouse chicks fall into a grip they are lost.”