From the archive
12 Sep 2026
When fire took hold of Glenmore and RSPB Abernethy this summer, burning through an area the size of Dundee, the first people on the ground were not helicopters. They were firefighters backed by more than a hundred volunteers, gamekeepers and land managers who knew every track and bog on the hill. The helicopters, when they finally came, had been thirty hours away - because the aircraft based in Scotland were already fighting fires in England and Wales.
It was not even the year's biggest burn. In 2025 a megafire at Dava and Carrbridge, on land managed for sheep and shooting, took out forty-five square miles of mostly moorland, an area the size of Manchester. Drained peat and burned heather make ready fuel, and once peat catches it can smoulder underground for weeks or even months. Almost every one of these fires begins with a person. The Cairngorms now bans summer campfires by byelaw, with signs on every road into the park.
What actually stops fire is less dramatic than aircraft. It is water. Where peatlands have been rewetted, where beavers have dammed burns, where rivers have been reconnected to their floodplains, moisture sits in the ground and fire struggles to cross it. The pattern seems to have held this summer: the rewetted peatland and the naturally grazed ground came through in better shape, while the drained and intensively managed moorland proved the more flammable.
The Cairngorms National Park's Climate Adaptation Fund points at what preparedness looks like in practice: £300,000 shared among fourteen businesses and community groups this year, twelve of the grants spent on firefighting machinery and kit. Much of that equipment was already in use against the summer fire. The Scottish Rewilding Alliance now wants the government to call a Landscape Resilience Summit bringing together land managers of every kind, emergency services, communities and scientists - because the people who know the terrain are the ones who will be standing on it when the next fire starts.
The cheapest fire defence on peat ground is water: block the drains that dry a moor out and the rewetted peat resists burning, where a drained moor turns to fuel. For the kit side, small community money exists - twelve of the Cairngorms park's fourteen adaptation grants this year, from a £300,000 fund, bought firefighting machinery and equipment, and most of it was used within months.
Trees for Life · Read the source