Why peat bogs are worth treading carefully on

Blanket bog covers more of the UK's uplands than most walkers realise — the Peak District, the North York Moors, the Pennines, Snowdonia, the Flow Country, Dartmoor and countless smaller moors in between. These are among our oldest living landscapes, built up over thousands of years by sphagnum mosses and cotton grass that lay down plant remains faster than they rot. The result is a deep, waterlogged, carbon-rich soil that filters our drinking water, holds back floodwater and stores more carbon per hectare than almost any other habitat in Britain.

It is also astonishingly fragile. Peat accumulates at something in the region of a millimetre a year, so a metre of the stuff may represent ten centuries. A single boot print punched through the surface can still be visible twenty years later, and the bare patch it leaves tends to dry, crack and blow away, taking the peat with it. Damaged peat takes decades to recover, and some of it never does.

Stick to the path, even when the path is a mess

The most useful thing any walker can do on the moor is simple: use the path that is already there. Well-trodden routes are usually the ones that have been surveyed, pitched with stone or laid with boardwalk precisely because the ground beneath them cannot take traffic. A path that has been there for fifty years can carry a hundred pairs of boots a day without further harm. A new line of footprints across virgin bog starts a fresh wound.

That means walking through the middle of the muddy section rather than around it. It feels counterintuitive — nobody enjoys sinking to the ankle — but the puddle in the centre of the path is the part that is already damaged. It is the verge that is still intact, and it is the verge that will not recover. A few habits worth forming:

• Keep to the centre line of the path, even when it is churned and wet. Wear gaiters and accept damp feet.
• If you do step aside, step where others have obviously stepped before — the same worn spots, not a fresh one.
• Do not overtake by trampling the heather and moss at the edges, however tempting the drier ground looks.
• On open moorland with no path, spread out rather than funnelling into a new line — or choose a different route entirely if the ground is clearly fragile.

Don't widen the scars that are already there

Erosion on peat is rarely caused by one person. It is caused by the tenth person following the first. A narrow route on soft ground quickly becomes a braided mess of parallel trails, and a path that started sixty centimetres across can become three metres of bare, exposed peat within a season or two.

• Cross bare, eroded peat at right angles and keep moving, rather than wandering along the exposed edge.
• Keep well back from the crumbling lips of peat hags and groughs. They undercut and collapse, and loose peat you knock down takes years to revegetate.
• Do not kick steps into peat banks or cut footholds with a boot edge. Use a walking pole for balance instead.
• Resist building cairns or shifting stones to make a crossing easier — what looks helpful often just funnels people onto fragile ground.

Dogs on the moor

Dogs do more damage to peat than most owners realise. Claws break the surface far more easily than boots, and a dog running wide, spinning or scrabbling at a scent can churn up a patch of bog in seconds. Digging is worse still — a determined terrier can excavate a hole that exposes bare peat and drains the surrounding area.

• Keep dogs on a lead or under very close control on deep peat and near hag edges.
• Follow local seasonal restrictions. Between roughly 1 March and 31 July, and often longer, ground-nesting birds such as curlew, golden plover and dunlin are on the moor, and loose dogs cause serious disturbance.
• Stop digging the moment it starts, and discourage scrabbling at holes or roots.
• Keep dogs out of bog pools and wet flushes, which are easily disturbed and slow to recover.

When the ground is at its most vulnerable

Peat is not equally fragile all year. After heavy rain it is soft and easily displaced, so a wet winter's walking leaves the deepest marks. In a dry summer, exposed peat turns brittle and dusty, and wind lifts it away from any scar. A hard frost can make the surface seem firm underfoot, but the thaw that follows is often the worst time of all. In these conditions, consider a lower, drier route, or stick rigidly to waymarked and surfaced paths.

Small habits that add up

Most of us will never deliberately damage a bog. The harm comes from small, well-meaning decisions: stepping round a puddle, letting the dog off for a run, cutting a corner on a bend. Multiply those across thousands of walkers and you get the eroded gullies and bare peat plains that conservation teams spend years trying to repair.

Walk lightly, stay on the durable line, and leave the moor as you found it. It will be there for the next thousand years of walkers — provided we tread carefully for the next few decades.