From the archive
10 Sep 2026
When fire took hold of RSPB Abernethy and Glenmore this summer, burning an area the size of Dundee, the response looked nothing like the tidy diagram of who does what. The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service led, but alongside them were more than a hundred volunteers, gamekeepers who knew the ground, and bulldozers cutting firebreaks. The helicopters that finally dropped water arrived thirty hours after they were needed, because the ones based in Scotland had been sent to fires in England and Wales.
The equipment that actually reached the flames on time had mostly been bought a few months earlier, locally and cheaply. The Cairngorms National Park's Climate Adaptation Fund had granted £300,000 to fourteen businesses and community groups this year, and twelve of those grants went on firefighting machinery and kit. Much of it was deployed during the blaze. It is a telling detail: the national provision was a day and a half away in another country, while a modest parish-scale fund had already put tools into the hands of people who knew the terrain.
The year before, a fire the size of Manchester had burned 45 square miles of moorland at Dava and Carrbridge - ground kept for sheep and shooting, not rewilding. That matters because of what burned and what did not. Trees for Life, writing after visiting the site, notes that rewetted peatland and naturally grazed areas seem to have escaped the worst of the recent fire. Burnt and drained grouse moor, by contrast, dries into fuel, and peat that catches can smoulder for weeks.
The prevention side is less glamorous than helicopters. People start these fires - campfires, cigarettes on tinder-dry ground - and the Cairngorms now bans summer campfires by byelaw, with signs on every road into the park. The longer defence is wetter land: rewetted peat, beaver wetlands, native broadleaf woods, rivers allowed to wiggle and spill. Water, as the piece puts it plainly, stops fire.
The cheapest firebreak is water held on the hill. On drained ground, blocking one moorland grip with a hand-built peat or heather-bale dam costs a day with a spade and almost nothing in materials, and keeps the peat wet into the dry season. Community groups near fire-prone land can also ask their national park or council what adaptation funds exist for fire kit - in the Cairngorms the grants were small, fast and local.
Trees for Life · Read the source