That’s me in the photo. This is my account of my year as a volunteer countryside ranger for an organisation called the Eastern Moors Partnership on a small part of the eastern edge of the Peak District National Park in England.
My reasons for writing it are a few-fold … principally so that people can get an under-the-skin perspective on what goes on (as I say) ‘in the Park after dark’. I’ll comment later about the crux of what I see the problem to be for the National Park, but perhaps a very small way of doing something about that is to inform people about the ways in which the Park and the countryside on its margins are used and abused.
Secondly, as the tempo of everything increases, I seem to lose clarity on what happened when and where. This is in effect my scrapbook for the year.
Thirdly because a few people whose experience and advice I respect suggested a ‘year on the moors’ type long blog post would be a good thing to do.
I started writing it thinking a few thousand words would suffice. It got to nigh on 15000.
Characters
Although written by me and mostly about things I was involved in, most of the time I was accompanied by Danny and or Sam for nocturnal goings on. During the daytime there are a small number of employees of EMP as well as a few dozen volunteer rangers.
This post does not reflect the opinion or policy of any organisation that I work or volunteer for. It is solely my perspective on a year mostly spent outdoors. A lot of it has been covered on my Instagram feed and blog but some of the opinion pieces, weird events and wildlife crime haven’t.
Geography
The Eastern and Burbage Moors are approximately 14 square miles of the Peak District National Park on the edges of Sheffield. The Eastern Moors Partnership, a joint initiative between the National Trust and the RSPB, manage the Eastern Moors on behalf of the Peak District National Park and the Burbage, Houndkirk and Hathersage Moors on behalf of Sheffield City Council.
The Eastern Moors consist of Totley Moss, Ramsley Moor, Big Moor, Clod Hall, Jack Flat and Leash Fen.
I volunteer for the Eastern Moors Partnership, but I also end(ed) up involved in a variety of things around the margins of the EMP landscape – places like the Porter and Mayfield Valleys and the Stanage North Less Estate.
Prelude ..
I ought to have realised that 2025 would see me spending a lot of time outdoors as the end of 2024 had me on foot on the northern part of the EMP every day from the start of the Christmas holidays until New Year and beyond.
Do you remember it reaching 19c on Boxing Day 2024 ?
It ended up as 16 consecutive days spent out there either side of the New Year, brewing up at Badgers Houses or the original Parsons House and enjoying the mostly cold dry weather as 2024 slipped into 2025 …
January
Started cold. With cold comes the issue of young men in 4x4s that they have bought for a small amount, often without tax or MOT or insurance and they believe themselves to be talented rally drivers. In and of itself this wouldn’t necessarily be an issue for rangers, but they end up driving off Houndkirk and on to moorland habitat as well as damaging walls, tracks and (in daytime) posing considerable risk to other rights if way users. This coupled with the magnetic attraction of snow to the masses created mayhem.
I’m probably not giving a decent perspective on the increase in tempo of issues as the year progressed. In a Thursday in the last week of March the logbook records ‘two barbecues, a car in a ditch, a long time using technology to confirm that the intentions of several people in woodland after dark did not involve fire, a game of ‘where the hell is that smoke coming from’, then a stint of fly-tipping reporting via ClearWaste just to round the evening’.
And that wasn’t even a weekend!
We get less periods of snow due to climate change, so the country at large is less familiar with the phenomenon that used to be called ‘winter’ and lasted many weeks. So, the country shits itself, buys all the bread and loo roll and charges out the door to get a winter fix – and the landscape simply cannot cope. Snow makes kids of adults who own cars.
Houndkirk is one of the few (and probably the longest?) Byway Open to All Traffic hereabouts. However, having seen a dick on skis being pulled at speed by a Land Rover narrowly miss a family walking with a toddler it strikes me that for the benefit of the majority there is going to have to be serious consideration given to banning 4x4s from it in winter conditions. I’d seen somewhere in the region of 200 of them over this period and there are very few of them that drove responsibly (or weren’t pissed / stoned / missing tax or insurance or MOT or a few windows or left gates open ….). Pulling my ‘straight face’ on, I’m amazed there wasn’t a serious accident on there.
I read ‘The Place of Tides’ by James Rebanks a few months ago. I think the level of interest, involvement, understanding and passion for a very small geographical area had an impact on me. I’m also privileged to call Bill Gordon a friend and his ridiculously deep knowledge of the people, place, flora, fauna and history of the Stanage North Lees Estate in Derbyshire never ceases to amaze me. So what? I could have gone almost anywhere for my Christmas holiday (I am lucky to have the financial means) but I ‘holidayed’ almost in sight of home. Every time I pick up ‘that’ book by Chris Goddard I realise there is a story on the ‘Kirk, Houndkirk Moor, Burbage Moor and Burbage Valley going back to at least the Bronze Age. I’ve a lot to learn. Perhaps the speed you do or don’t pass through a landscape is significant too …
The other exacerbating factor (in addition to sheer numbers and idiots) when the snow comes is the parking.
Damage to verges in 2025 was extraordinary and inexcusable. I wrote about it nigh on every month. Most times I would get a reply involving the magical ‘they’ as being responsible. ‘They’ need to make more car parks, ‘they’ need to put a bus on, ‘they’ need to sort the problem out. Othering the problem of irresponsible and damaging car parking to someone else. It was happening in the first week of the year and still on the last week of the year. The verges of most of EMP and the wider National Park are absolutely ruined.
If you’ve crossed a solid white line or mounted a kerb to park in a lay-by you’re not in the lay-by. They’re denoted by a dashed white line. Yeah, but what does it matter? As well as habitat loss and visual impact a lot of the verge parking around the Eastern Moors is having a significant effect on water runoff. When you park there because they’ve parked there so it should be okay, the cumulative effect means water takes new routes off the moor and edges and either pools on the trashed verges which in turn further worsens the impact, or results in water crossing the road and causing ‘terrain traps’ for ice in winter and gravel after heavy rain.
So, again, you’re damaging the very place you’ve come to enjoy. For further details drive down past Higger Tor towards Whim Wood (slowly).
As I look back to January, I see themes that continue through the year. We were moving boulders to block the latest way that illegal off roaders had found to access the SSSI moorland in January and we were still doing it this week (late December). I really hate having to see fences erected or boulders moved, but if you understand the flora and fauna on the moor and the damage that the vehicles do to the moorland then it’s a necessary ongoing game of wack-a-mole.
Those 16 days went past in a flash. I remembered I had a day job and returned to ‘normal’ life on Sunday night ready to polish my brogues and iron my corporate y-fronts ready for Monday. As it was, I went for a walk along Houndkirk the next night. A 4×4 had left all 3 gates open along the track (allowing cattle to escape and potentially reach the nearby main road). It also left a cloud of weed you could’ve smelt in Hull.
Looking back at what I wrote in mid-January a lot of it was ‘too busy to write’ and merely a collage of photographs. Perhaps an omen of what was to come. I guess an idea of what sort of things ‘being busy’ entails would be helpful …
Damage to walls and fences by off roaders and also occasionally by poaching (smashing the wall to extract deer)
Fires (of all manner of sizes and types)
Escaped livestock
Livestock bothering
Wildlife crime
Assisting people with breakdowns, being lost, etc
Abandoned vehicles
Assisting the police with RTCs (both cars and animals)
etc ….
One thing that did arrive was Storm Eowyn which, being the idiot that I am, I went up Higger Tor to enjoy and got promptly blown around like tumbleweed.
Just to balance the books a bit regarding off-roaders I had an enjoyable coffee (brewed up at Badger Houses) with two off road motorcyclists in late January. They explained how Houndkirk was now listed on a Europe wide on and off-road trail riding route. They spent several holidays a year riding to Europe to enjoy trails and to also help with work parties to repair and maintain them. There were also a few chats in the month with winter backpackers. Solitary types who excelled at a leave no trace approach to the hardships of sleeping out at this time of year.
Above – some more of January in pictures
February
Bring on the weirdness.
And a load more posts from back then titled ‘too busy to write’ and including dozens and dozens of photos of incidents and events.
In February we had three episodes which I’m not sure we have disclosed too publicly but which serve to illuminate the ‘in the Park after dark’ aspect of what goes on on the margins of a National Park and a major city. I think these are in chronological order …
A bag was found behind an access gate to Big Moor. The bag contained dead dogs. The dogs were used as ‘training’ opponents for other dogs that are involved in illegal dog fighting. This was apparently the second find of a bag of these contents in recent years.
A report was received of a ‘dead deer’ in Whim Wood. I went. My nose found it first. A deer had been shot and killed for its skull and antlers and the rest left. The head had been removed in situ by something blunt and not designed for butchery.
The upper torso of a sex doll was found behind a wall on Big Moor adjacent to a lay-by.
I enjoy chatting to all sorts of folks about my nighttime exploits on and around the Eastern Moors. Many of them think it’s a haven for badgers and owls whilst all the humans are tucked up in bed. The above three incidents disprove that popular theory.
P.S. what is it with Whim Wood? I can happily wander anywhere in the dark and sit still and enjoy the silence but not Whim Wood – it makes the hairs on my neck stand up and my senses alert.
In early February I was notified of a fire off our patch (on the road under Stanage). It was a sort of BBQ / fire / fly tip in that the man involved had various flame sources on the go, crap everywhere and was waiting for his mate to come back from Hathersage with more food. His tent looked like it had been put up with his eyes closed. I had a chat. I / we have no enforcement powers (and even less off our patch) and the man initially refused to budge or tidy up. When he did leave, he threw a lot of his mess in the nearby stream. The National Park media team posted this photo on their social media feed (albeit with the head of the person covered by an emoji) and the regional and national papers picked up on it. The Park rang me a few days later to apologise for using it without credit – and to tell me that they had taken the image down due to the onslaught of racial abuse aimed at the ‘camper’.
You might also recollect the anti-cyclonic depression that sat over the Peak for days but felt like months. Grey for ages. I think this broke on the 17th and there was an actual sunset. Goats were sacrificed in joyous gratitude to the gods. Apparently.
And the weather brought the twin ‘joys’ of BBQs and also of moorland being burnt for the management of grouse.
One joyous discovery was in ‘first bay’ on Curbar Edge of a BBQ scar, a take away Starbucks cup and a human shit. What an amazing early Spring evening out that must have been.
In February in ‘Unherd’ the farmer and author James Rebanks wrote:
‘When we agree to the principle of offsetting, we accept that the cost of helping nature in one place is its destruction in another. That means a fossil fuel company can bribe a wildlife trust or NGO into greenwashing what they’re doing by offsetting their carbon credits. In this way, we are all made complicit in the systemic destruction of the natural world.’
One of the downsides of being very focussed on a subject is that your attention to other areas of life can suffer. Having been employed on classified work in my military career I pride myself on being ‘situationally aware’. In late February, with a head full of the day job and probably too many hours spend roving in the dark I fell victim to a financial scam. All of my bank accounts were emptied including the remains of my gratuity from my military service. The ensuing fortnight was filed under ‘challenging’, with many lessons learnt.
March
I spent the first day of the month in a local woodland (not EMP) observing where crossbow and shotgun had been used both against wildlife and also in a sort of militia training range for pissed up dickheads. Tarp shelters, targets and glass lager bottles abounded. I then plodded down to the Norfolk Arms for a cold drink. I sat outside and heard three young buzzards way up high playing on a thermal. Craning my head back to see them I almost missed the wonderful sight and sound of two dozen plus curlew flying low loops over the top of the Porter and Limb Valleys. A sight and sound to behold and a salve for the woes.
On my way down to recover an owl monitoring audio device on the first weekend of March I noticed a tent. Nice place for a tent. By the time i’d recovered the monitor the ‘campers’ had lit a fire on the edge of woodland in a SSSI. Whilst i spoke to them – asked them to extinguish it – and then i walked out to get tools to soak the fire site, a colleague (with permissions in place) flew a drone overhead for my safety and to keep an eye on the fire and campers until firefighting kit was brought down.
Along with this fire and a bit of sunshine the weekend also brought cannabis waste, livestock bothering, multiple counts of illegal off-road motorbiking, several hundred cases of selfish verge-damaging cars parked wherever the f*ck they want, fly tipping, and dog shit bags everywhere. And it’s only the first weekend of March.
On the brighter side … curlew, lapwing, deer and adder seen and snipe heard.
Although we had owned and used drones a reasonable amount in the previous year, and they are used by EMP for various monitoring purposes, it was around this time that drones became an absolutely essential part of our nighttime kit. Mainly currently using a DJI 2EA and a 3T these allow us to safeguard rangers as they walk ‘towards the unknown’. Likewise the ability to put a drone over woodland or moorland (with the relevant thermal settings) and ID fires (by their temperature) within 30 seconds of launch, rather than literally walking the landscape using a combination of luck and sniffing the night air, is an absolute gamechanger. Importantly we can also record for evidential purposes – whether that is to disprove the opinion of the people claiming not to have a fire or to create evidence for the police or other agencies. We have evolved to using the speaker on the drone to speak ‘live’ to firelighters which is a proven way of getting fires extinguished quicker. Sometimes we also dance around carparks in the dark whilst the drone plays ABBA and we hope no one is watching …
Words on a page cannot emphasise the importance of thermal drones to nighttime rangering (*when the weather permits).
The other ‘alarm bell’ that the first weekend of March presented was a realisation of the extent of vehicle borne visitation to the landscape. Many of the lay-bys and carparks (and most of the verges !!!) around the landscape were busier that weekend than they were during the ‘busiest ever’ period following the release from lockdown during the pandemic.
With more and more people (both in general and due to the turning of the seasons) in the landscape I begin to twitch around unoccupied cars and certain circumstances ….
Late on Friday and Saturday nights driving around the car parks and laybys of the moors hereabouts trying to deduce why unoccupied cars are where they are and whether there is anything to make you twitch.
An example would be a car with camouflage kit in the back alongside a wood where deer have been beheaded. Or a car parked across a gateway with the interior light on and in excess of fifty empty alcohol and medicine bottles inside. Or even the sensibly parked car in a main car park (which doesn’t permit overnight parking) but which has no sign of human use inside whatsoever.
Where are the users of these vehicles and are they a wildfire, livestock or wildlife risk ?
Out with the thermal imager. Up with the thermal drone. Noses sensitive to smoke. Eyes peeled for torchlight or flame.
Hope is not a plan.
Trust has to be given out. You can’t ranger this landscape from a standpoint of mistrust and from a perspective that every single person aims to do the landscape harm (albeit the % of those that do rises sharply after dusk).
I’m driving the ‘northern loop’ at night. I see headlights and humans at the back of a car park. Instinct tells me to drive by and have a look back with the thermal. The almost out BBQ was hidden by the headlights but clear as day through the scope. It’s a disposable sat on two stones on tarmac. I walk back.
Four lads. Finished cooking a meal after sunset in Ramadan. I explain that I have to ask them to extinguish the BBQ …. but given the circumstances I’ll let them finish their food (which they kindly offer to share with me). They promise me it’ll all be cleared up and removed. I trust them.
I return in the morning to find the food waste and plastic across the moor. The BBQ in a bag in a nearby hedge. The coals on the grass.
I’m disappointed in myself. Those coals could have ignited the grass along the fenceline.
I repeat to myself …. Trust has to be given out. You can’t ranger this landscape from a standpoint of mistrust and from a perspective that every single person aims to do the landscape harm …. but with more and more twitches every night and the increasing erosion of trust, maintaining a positive perspective gets harder and harder.
Another news story from March was the overlap of my day job and my EMP volunteering. As part of a CPRE Peak District and South Yorkshire funded project to commemorate their centenary, 100 trees were planted. Ethel Haythornthwaite worked tirelessly to protect the landscapes around the city of Sheffield and the charity thought it appropriate to both sponsor this project and be actively involved in it as a way to create a landscape scale centenary celebration.
The aim was to replace iconic moorland trees that have been ravaged by time, deer, lightning or weather and to establish some “corridors” to link existing woodlands, in areas that have been identified as important for bird species such as Willow Tit and Ring Ouzel. Species planted were predominantly Hawthorn and Rowan (the latter is particularly tasty to deer!), with a few Oaks and Willow in bracken and wet areas respectively.
The guards are a temporary fix to allow the trees to establish, so the duration that they’ll be on depends on how quickly they grow. Hopefully approx. 3-5 years until they can “fend for themselves”. They can then be reused several times and eventually recycled. Although they are quite shiny at the moment, I’ve been told they will soon rust, so will begin to blend in a bit more. With my CPRE and my EMP hats on I probably only helped plant a dozen or so of the hundred – most of the credit goes to the EMP staff. Although the Lord Mayor did get in on the act and plant one.
The other issue that re-emerges as the weather improves in Springtime is the fly tipping from house renovations. Mid-March saw a whole roof dumped near Bamford Edge. Additionally, the requirement for drystone for walling – but without paying for it – sees the capstones on existing walls start to disappear. Cattiside was robbed and we have had issues around Fox Lane right throughout the year with someone stealing several metres of stone a month. We also carted a tip off Houndkirk which is unusual as it requires a 4×4 to get along the track. A load of waste that was a risk to the inquisitive Luing cattle on there.
I urge people to use the ClearWaste app to report fly tipping (and to dial 999 if they see it in progress). You can report anonymously via ClearWaste.
I managed to get qualified to drive an Argo CAT and also refreshed my off-road driving skills around this time of year too. The Argo’s are invaluable on wildfire sites.
The actions of the ‘Nutter’ also increased in tempo in March. An example of the wide range of challenges the rangers face. The Nutter is buggering the latch assemblies for gates hereabouts by deliberately removing the bolt and nut. I have no idea what behavioural malfunction causes someone to wake up on a morning and decide they’re going to go out and do that, but it leads to gates being unable to self-close and a risk of livestock getting out. If you’re the ‘nutter’ or you know who the ‘nutter’ is can you just stop.
Speaking of odd people. And a chaotic last weekend of March where the three of us volunteered for more than 25 hours each (starting from teatime on the Friday). I found a young man (in TNF sliders) making traditional ‘Pommes de terre sur le barbecue près de la voiture’ for his girlfriend (in a dressing gown) at Dennis Knoll. For non-French speakers he had a lit BBQ in his car passenger footwell with jacket potatoes on it. His girlfriend was in the driver’s seat in a dressing gown. True Love.
Oftentimes you walk or drive away from an incident saying ‘nothing surprises me anymore’ and then the next one just blows your brain.
Above – March in other pictures
Before we unleash April, I thought I’d touch on ‘the problem’. I’ll keep it simple but also reference the parking permits as an example ….
National Parks are run by Authorities e.g. the Peak District National Park Authority. For about a decade the sitting government of the day has defunded these Authorities. For the Peak it’s now equivalent to a circa 45% reduction in income. The Authorities of all the National Parks own hardly any of the actual National Park. Again, for the Peak they own circa 4% of the land in the Park (the rest is owned by the likes of National Trust, other charities, Forestry Commission, private landowners and utilities companies). So, to try and claw back the let’s call it halving of their income from government the Authority has very limited ways in which it can raise revenue. One of these is by increasing the cost of car parking …. hold that thought ..
For about a decade but exponentially accelerated by the pandemic the visitation numbers to the National Park are on the increase. We routinely now see any sunny weekend day having more visitors than one of the ‘crazy’ days after lockdown ended.
There are simply not enough car parking spaces to meet the demand. The National Park doesn’t own the right land in the right places to build sustainable travel options. And it doesn’t have any money. So, nothing changes. The private car remains the easiest way of getting into the countryside. More visitors mean more damage from vehicles and congestion. And back to the point of increasing car parking costs … towards the end of March the National Park announced it was raising the cost of an annual parking pass (for a car) from £40 to £78. This was met with outrage. Mostly from people who could actually afford the increase but wanted to enjoy using the car parks for the equivalent of about 11 pence a day rather than 21 pence a day. The same people who rant and rage about the ever decreasing condition of the Peak … and who may or may not read the nigh on monthly bulletins from the Park about how it is having to undertake another round of cuts and redundancies due to a lack of funding. I wrote a blog post at the time which clearly touched a nerve.
For those at the back that aren’t listening … The Authority that runs the National Park has nowhere near enough money to fulfil its role. And as the budget deficit grows year on year, so the number of visitors increases year on year, so the ‘real world’ problem gets exponentially worse.
And those refusing to pay a modest fee to park in a car park park on the verges in ever increasing numbers and the Park has not got the funds for effective enforcement or for the damage to verges, walls and drainage that verge parking causes. Ad infinitum.
P.S. If you’re still up in arms about the increase the best thing you can do isn’t complain to me or to PDNPA (and it really isn’t park illegally instead), it’s hold your MP to account for the funding that Protected Landscapes get from DEFRA.
The second best thing you can do is use public transport (which I also accept is suboptimal – maybe rant at your MP about that too).
Shoot me down for a sweeping generalisation but if you can afford to own, maintain and fuel a £30/40/50/60K car then you can afford to pay £78 for a year of free parking in PDNPA owned car parks.
There really is no money left in Protected Landscapes so think of this £78 as a modest donation to Park upkeep with the added bonus of free parking thrown in.
An annual pass in the Yorkshire Dales NP is £62 and in the Lake District it costs £300.
Sermon ends.
And we’re only in April. Strap yourselves in ….
April
On the 2nd of April which was a Wednesday we had put two BBQs adjacent to bone dry moorland out by 5pm. On the 3rd of April I watched a college course manoeuvring around Surprise View woodland with replica automatic weapons. On the 4th of April there was an enormous amount of human waste and flapping filthy loo roll on Burbage Moor near the Fox Inn (which has working toilets). On the 4th of April an entire house clearance was dumped on The Dale. On the 4th of April there was a lit BBQ near Burbage South and an eagle eyes colleague spotted a camper van on Ringinglow Rd with a fire pit a BBQ and bags and bags of logs and coals under the van.
That’s more or less how the month progressed tbh.
I think the 12th of April was the first time that we used the speaker on the drone to inform people having a fire that 1) fires were not allowed in the landscape 2) they were to extinguish the fire immediately 3) Rangers were on their way and the fire brigade and if necessary the police would be called. There is drone footage of the fire being put out in seconds. Most of the time we still walk into the fire site. For the record anyone lighting a fire (e.g. a BBQ or a campfire) will be invited to leave the Eastern Moors estate.
On the 15th I had a little moment of immense anger at the non-stop shit show … and wrote …
I got this lot off from the Moor near the cart track on Cam Height last night. Farmer were gathering his sheep off the Moor and spotted it. A few bevvies and cheeseburgers on a couple of BBQs and a can of Lynx Ice deodorant. Makings of a smashing night out ont’ Moor. I tried to do like a video about it but the wind noise + my technical incompetence + a general malaise from having to argue with idiots most of the day about not trashing nature and wildlife = an 8-minute long sweary rant which wouldn’t upload. Maybe everyone’ll start doing the simple things right in the countryside and my blood pressure can come back down. Maybe I’ll learn how to do the clips better and earn millions from a Netflix series called ‘The Ranting Ranger’. Maybe knitting socks in a padded cell would be a better use of my spare time. // If the levels of visitation continues to increase at massively unsustainable levels, a small % of those visitors / users continue to treat the landscape with disdain and the authorities continue to be defunded (and some of the largest nature facing organisations scale back any engagement other than selling cream teas and feed-a-lamb days), I don’t see any way forward. We’ll end up with a landscape scale wildfire or other human caused decimation of nature after which everyone will give a fake shit about nature until Saturday when the next episode of Strictly airs and it’ll all loop round again. Nothing ever happens. Have a lovely day.
As it mentions I also recorded a ranting long video about it all. Which I uploaded (after I had rerecorded it minus the swearing). Videos have become a thing haven’t they, or ‘reels. I’ve made a few. The viewing figures for some are huge.
Dear reader I haven’t noticed a single behavioural change from anything I have written, photographed or videoed about. Nothing.
On a lighter note, one of the more enjoyable things that I have done for several years is as a volunteer Ring Ouzel monitor as a sub-project for EMP organised by Kim Leyland. It’s very meditative to watch the crags and moorlands from March waiting for these little buggers to appear from North Africa (if they’ve avoided becoming a deep-fried snack on an island in the Med). Whenever time allowed, I had a ‘Ouzel perusal’ … to no avail. Then the legend and good friend that is Bill Gordon and his wife Flo visited in April. I set off on foot with Bill near Burbage West …. almost immediately a female flies by. Then a male. Then he identified a possible nest site. I swear they know their best human friend is back!! Ladies, gentlemen, the Ouzel whisperer aka The Sheriff was back amongst us.
As an aside I did notice that I did far less Ouzel’ing in 2025 as a direct result of the ridiculous tempo of ‘everything else’.
Most of the rest of April is a blur of chasing leads about fires, finding fires with the drone, or using intuition to guess where fires might be. Just to rebalance the social stereotypes, the last Saturday of the month was spent chasing a bunch of educated entitled idiots around the Eastern Moors as they apologised profusely for a fire in Burbage and then left the area (having been told they couldn’t return within 72hrs) … only to find them hours later in woodland nearer Sheffield with an even bigger fire. These aren’t the ne’er do wells coming round ‘ere without a clue and setting fire to the moors, these are clever young men who had seen the local and national news about wildfires and thought fuck it we’ll have one anyway, and when moved on for criminal damage to woodland went and did the same thing a second time.
Sigh.
In one of my many and often chats with the local tenant farmer (Nick Denniff) we had got on about the history of Higger Lodge (I think the subject started with me having sat watching a pair of Ouzels in the ruins of the lodge). Nick then reeled off the history of the Four farms that are no more …. 1) Stone House 2) Piper House 3) Badger Houses 4) Higger Lodge. So off I went and visited them all. The view from Higger Lodge and Piper House must have been exceptional.
Perhaps a paragraph here on livestock would be helpful. They live here. The moorland and valleys are a farmed landscape. You will see cows and sheep wandering the landscape. It’s what they do. This is their home. You will also see a few farmers trying to manage the livestock. It isn’t a cow petting zoo or a feed-the-lambs park. Humans and their dogs giving all livestock a respectable wide berth will keep the blood pressure of farmers and rangers down. Pulling the tail of a cow or trying to ride one is a common occurrence but is neither bright nor legal.
I wrote at the end of the month –
We’re one small sachet of jam trying to spread itself across 56km2 of moorland. We may well be the only ranger resource out after dark in the whole National Park. Possibly another seven or so rainless days ahead. The fire risk rises further. Don’t be a dick.
May
Dear God.
I’ll just focus on two events (but fear naught dear reader the rest of the month was a non stop chuffing shambles as well ….)
1.
Alex rang at 1538hrs on Friday May 18th. The call is logged as lasting 22 seconds. Eighteen of them were Alex shouting..
TOMOTHERESAFUCKINGFIREATFROGGATTFROGGATTISFUCKINGALIGHTFUCKINGHELL
the last 4 seconds were me saying ‘where exactly’ and him replying, ‘i’ll message you’. And he did. And he sent this grid. SK 24951 76509. This was the beginnings of the Froggatt Fire.
I shan’t repeat the whole article, you can read it here
At the time that was a big thing for us. Little were we to know that wildfires would become a massive issue in the UK during 2025 and will continue to become so more and more. The increase in wildfire incidents between 2024 and 2025 was circa 700%.
I’m really proud to have been able to help. Learnt loads. Been humbled by fire. We all zoned in and bugger all else mattered for a few days. It reminded me of military operations. Just getting stuck in. Filthy. Sweating. Knackered. Running on adrenaline.
A comedy memory from all of that was the three of us collapsing back at The Grouse for cold drinks. I had caught the zip for my flame-retardant suit in my base layer. As Sally (the landlady) came out of The Grouse my back was to her, and she could see Danny knelt down at groin height to me making frantic movements as he tried to get the zip out. Sally didn’t know where to look.
2.
The Battle of Bole Hill was an incident that one of our informants ‘warned’ us about …
Details had come to our attention about a happening in Bolehill (a large area of old quarries home to ravens and kestrels and a sea of stunning silver birch and a lot of climbers). Alcohol and fire were mentioned.
Not that bothered about the alcohol.
Everything in moderation.
Except wildfire.
After a 2.5 hr update meeting about all things patrol rangering we hastily scoffed yet another chippy tea and went out out to be patrol rangers.
These long daylight days enable us to see what folks are carrying from car to countryside and so it was that we settled in for a look see for people heading to a party.
And there they were …
The first three likely partygoers …. polite questions …. Are you camping? ….no the mat is for me to relax on …. Are you cooking anything? …. No, I’ve brought a box of cereal and a lot of milk, cereal is the healthiest snack there is …. and we’re getting the last bus home …
Not a 24 can box of Stella anywhere.
…. Later on the party host (whose birthday it was) walked back out of the quarries and explained to we rangers the modus operandi of the party … he was wearing a shirt and tie … they were going to project a screen on to the main quarry wall and all sit down and watch ‘Stand By Me’.
We stood the riot police and the dozen Belgian Malinois down …
A taxi driver approaches me asking for water. They sell it at the Fox House I reply. Is there any running naturally around here he asks. Afraid not. I then see his passenger (possibly related?) dressed in traditional thawb …. And instead of thinking ‘fools … why are they going walking without water’, I realised the elder of the two wanted to pray in the countryside and gladly gave him some water for which he was very grateful and washed his hands before heading towards the setting sun.
Then the gang of ten lads. All suns out guns out and big gold chains. Loud. No idea where they are or where the best walk is. Banter. Whose got the fastest car or the biggest muscles. I direct them up to Millstone and as they’re leaving I stop them and give them a stern warning about not messing about edge side of the boundary fence. An hour later they come back having stood with their toes on the edge mesmerised by the drop below them. How do people climb there they ask? Thanks for telling us about the drop they all say. Man, that was scary shit a few of them comment. We talk about mountain rescue and indoor climbing and getting started. All the rangers get a toot and a wave as they leave in their convoy of one litre dream machines.
Big dogs. Little dogs. Young couples dating in cars with no interest in anything other than each other. Fast cars. Crap cars. People from all walks of life. Welcome them as they get out their cars, remind them that the fire risk is high and ask that they refrain from smoking or having barbecues or fires on the moor. Then they ask for the best way to see the sunset. Most of them haven’t been here before. Suggested routes. Circular walks. Westward they go …
A drive round to put a pair of binoculars over the sun setters at Higger Tor. No sign of smoke or fire. Only of fun and forty odd people all facing the orange ball setting over the west end of the Hope Valley
Round to Burbage. A big bloke sat on a bench. Now then. Now then. Setting off or just finished? Just walked round there he said – pointing to the Burbage skyline route. What’s the bird making the tapping noise he asks? Stonechat I said and describe the noise. That’s the one, he says, liking that it’s called after the noise it makes. Where’d you see it I ask? He points down towards the woods and I reply, ‘near Scotland’ and then have to explain that the woods down there were originally planted in the shape of the England, Scotland and Wales.
I then mention the outlier of trees and point out Higger Tor. He says he loves that name … Higger … and for the next 10 minutes I talk him round the edges, woods, features and folklore of the valley. I name a lot of the species he might see and where best to sit and listen at dusk.
He wraps his head around the word ‘ouzel’. Repeats it to himself. Says he’s lived in Sheffield all his life and never knew any of this. Another bloke wanders up from the valley bottom and he loudly says, ‘ere mate this bloke knows everything come and listen to this’. I recommend (for the nth time) Chris Goddard’s book. I leave to go back to the other car park and he’s sat there transfixed, gazing across the valley.
Job done.
You don’t have to pay it’s after 6 o’ clock I say at least 50 times. This ‘in’ opens conversations, as does asking if Fido can have a biscuit. He can but he’s old. He can but he’s my son’s assistance dog. He can but watch your fingers. He’s a she and she’d love one. More route advice. More giving people thirty seconds of advice in words they can understand to enable them to translate what they’ve seen on TikTok or Instagram or their mates Facebook photos and make their way to sit up on Millstone or Mother Cap or Surprise View or Over Owler Tor and gaze west.
A German-but-we-live-in-California couple come back down full of thanks for the route advice and asking about the landscape of Longshaw and beyond and where they might visit the next day.
Eight men in the bottom of the car park stand around smoking vape and speaking a language I’m not certain about. I wander over to say hello. Now then young man says one. And we belly laugh out loud as we decide who actually is the youngest (me by 5 months). His handshake almost crushes my hand and his friendly pat on my back nearly forces my ribs out the front. White British men don’t gather in groups like this and go wandering together and stop for a smoke and belly laugh at each other’s stories. They ought to. More.
Maybe fifty or sixty or seventy people chatted to. All of them at least saved the cost of car parking. Loads of them had questions – especially the young ones. You need to know when to be straight and serious and when to banter. The bloke up at Burbage looked like he needed Burbage. I sensed a burden. The young lads with the toes at the lip of Millstone just needed someone to show them. A signpost. A hand. They will be at college today or their place of work telling their mates about the f’ing mad drop and the views and planning the next trip.
As I gaze across the moors and the valleys hereabouts, I see the drawbridge of engagement being pulled up everywhere. Many of the landowners and land managers retreating (due to budgetary cuts and ergo staff reductions) away from education and engagement – particularly from the difficult engagement.
Others, some of which absolutely do have money in their organisations, spout cultist sentences to the national media about more car parks being the only way to solve the crises in the countryside. Telling us how there are too many cars, so they propose accommodating more cars. Like a GP prescribing another 40 a day to a 60 a day smoker dying of lung cancer. Whilst simultaneously hauling up the aforementioned drawbridge of engagement. What remains ???
I don’t know how we lower the drawbridge again. There isn’t any money. Apparently. But without it, and without someone stood on the drawbridge to welcome people to the countryside and offer them a little bit of advice and a smile and to normalise the great unknown for them, the moat will only widen further. And further.
Postscript to the Battle
As I turn off my radio and walk to my car to head home, I notice that the windows are down and doors unlocked on birthday boys vintage Toyota Starlet. Cards and chocolates on the driver’s seat. Laptop on the passenger seat. I wind his windows up, pop the expensive items under his passenger seat and (being a pre-central locking model) I lock his car doors for him.
Somewhere over there in Bole Hill he’s getting proper mad for it on his second bowl of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes …
“To do good, you actually have to do something.” – Yvon Chouinard
Oh, also in May I got a copy of ‘The Lie of the Land’ by Guy Shrubsole. Eight pages in this sentence smacked me in the face and I’ve been kicking it round in my head ever since …
‘But the plural of anecdote is not data’.
Oh, and SpringWatch descended on the area.
And I escaped to Skiddaw House for a wee while. Previous turf. I read in the Keswick Reminder an article by Lucy Edwards about the ‘Secret Security Task Force’ that United Utilities are sponsoring in order to brown wash themselves whilst concurrently filling Windermere with human shit. In any and all of our Protected Landscapes it is vitally important to see what the hand that takes is doing whilst the other hand gives. I firmly believe that the previously mentioned collapse of funding for Protected Landscapes leaves them open to green (and brown) washing.
Above – others from May – yes that is a WW2 mortar shell
June
Same old same old. Fires from the get-go. Once in the Burbage Valley and once deep in Lawrencefield (aka Bole Hill) on the 2nd, and on both occasions the persons were observed extinguishing the fire within 30 seconds of a broadcasted message from the drone. The second of the two incidents was in dense woodland at night – difficult and potentially hazardous terrain for rangers – the fire-starting ‘wild campers’ were observed packing up very quickly and hastily walking back to their car (where a friendly ranger was stood waiting to have a natter). The couple told the ranger that they were ‘fully aware of the fire risk level and the zero-tolerance approach to fires in the National Park’ but ‘they thought they’d do it anyway’. My personal observations are that as well as significantly reducing the risk to rangers (by either ‘doing the job’ without them or providing overwatch for them), and increasing the areas the rangers can patrol, the drone significantly accelerates behavioural change due to the ‘fear’ to the firestarter that they are on camera. It also goes up and down hill much quicker than me …
As an aside, I try to have an open book approach to folks in the countryside and how they ‘behave’, I’m firmly of the opinion that some genuinely honestly do not know the first thing (the lack of formal education about the countryside and the overwhelming influence of shit off the internet spouting nonsense for sponsors muddies those waters), but if you are clever articulate adult humans and you state that you have seen all of the warning notices and decided to have a fire anyway then I’m all out of patience. I recollect a talk down in Burbage with some kids (I think from Stoke, but that’s irrelevant) who had not one iota of the ways and wherefores, but they were probably the most attentive ‘audience’ I’ve ever had. Danny and I walked them out to Burbage and they asked questions all the way and were adamant they were going to ask at school about getting ‘paid to do that dead good stuff in the countryside and look after it’. Winner winner chicken dinner.
As SpringWatch gathered momentum we issued an appeal …. The Eastern Moors rangers are appealing to birdwatchers photographing birds and chicks they believe are featuring on the programme to not share photos of chicks until they have fledged successfully to greatly reduce the risk of increased disturbance. We’re also appealing to the administrators of the usual Peak District wildlife / nature photography Facebook groups to remove such photographs.
Groups of over forty photographers, many of whom have driven very long distances as a result of seeing chicks on social media accounts are gathering close to some nests.
Take a few photographs from as far away as possible, leave the chicks and parents, their nest site and their immediate habitat alone, blur the photograph to hide any location evidence and stay there for the least possible amount of time before moving on. Simple.
We have previously had to involve the police as attention at the nest of some species resulted in major traffic congestion !! and photographers were observed moving owlets by hand to a fallen log for better light for their photographs.
Please stop persistently disturbing any wildlife for no reason other than increasing your own online ‘like’ count. The ‘Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981’ makes the law on this matter clear
Around mid-June I spent some time in a bush on the outskirts of Sheffield with some optics observing males and dawgs returning from a spot of hare coursing around the Mayfield and Porter Valleys. If you’re up to no good in the countryside after dark always presume, you’re on camera. You might be.
An interlude on tech. Routinely we now carry or have available to us close by … a thermal drone, thermal imaging scopes, binoculars and monocular, high quality video cameras, Kestrel weather station devices, radios, multiple torch and lighting options, remote ‘drop down’ Wi-Fi enabled 4g covert cameras, heat reading thermal sensors (for sensing temperature of fire sites) and multiple useful apps and tools on smartphones. It’s an expensive hobby this!!
14th of June =
7 fires and 1 fire prepped but unlit at the time. ON the way back home after that my colleagues had this to deal with … Passing Curbar Gap at about 1am they noticed a BBQ that was still hot next to a parked car that was steamed up. In order to ascertain ownership of said BBQ they knocked on the Qashqai window and were promptly confronted by an inebriated gentleman who a) the BBQ belonged to and b) wanted to have the conversation about the BBQ on the verge through the medium of violence. The car / BBQ owner was in fact stark bollock naked. Dear reader, whichever vehicle you choose as your chariot of overnight passion and however hot proceedings are getting inside it, please do not leave anything hot unattended outside the vehicle.
Scroll through the @derbyshirefrs socials for the incident showing what happens when a BBQ was left unattended near parked cars at Bamford Edge (Spoiler: it torched a long line of vehicles).
No naked flames
No naked owners of naked flames
On the 18th of June we began to see a twist to fly tipping whereby the tipper would then torch the material in order to burn evidence. Doing that adjacent to woodland is stupid. Doing that when your vehicle details were reported to the police by a member of the public is stupider.
The amount of tip offs we were getting by June was immense. I was using social media as a way of ‘telling the truth’ about the situation, but our little team had by default become the people that people rang for all manner of incidents and emergencies rather than 999. I help out on a small patch of moorland straddling Sheffield and the Peak. Mostly evenings and at night. 99% of it is lovely chats with lovely people, be they a resident from round the corner or a visitor from the other side of the world.
I tell stories, point out birds and animals, help folks find the right footpath for the best sunset. That sort of stuff. Oftentimes I’ll put some stuff ont’ socials along with advice, sarcasm, notes or emojis. Half rice half chips.
80+% of what me and my 2 or 3 colleagues get involved in doesn’t make it on to the socials and the vast majority of it isn’t in this review. Sometimes it’s mostly slapping the 48th midge bite whilst chatting with all sorts of lovely people. Sometimes it’s bags of dead dogs flung over a wall. It varies. We’re not the police or the fire and rescue service.
So the ‘rule’ is if the thing you want to ring or message me about is alight (aka a BBQ or a fire) or is an offence in law then dial 999.
There is a very high chance that if you DM me via social media to tell me you’ve just seen a BBQ or someone severing the head off a deer in Whim Wood … I won’t see the message for hours or even days. When a message was sent at 9pm ish one night about a BBQ I was ‘on silent’ in woodland looking for long eared owls. I read it at noon the next day.
One Saturday night someone spent a fair while driving around looking for me around Burbage and Surprise View wanting to tell me that they’d seen a large campfire ablaze in Stanage Plantation. But never found me. And never rang 999.
Please don’t inform me or any ranger as an alternative to ringing the emergency services. I’m not them. That’s not how it works.
And if you’ve got a ‘phone you’ve probably got a camera, a video recorder, a location provider and a voice notes recorder. Location and information and evidence matter. Hope that all makes sense.
The reluctance of many people to anonymously report issues and emergencies baffles me. They want ‘them problems sorting’ but won’t do the reporting bit. The local Rural Crime Team speak about jigsaw pieces and how a smallish bit of detail reported in might finish the puzzle and lead to crimes being solved.
Balloons, Dozens of bloody balloons. Fires. Lots of fires. Fires next to No Fires signs. People lighting fires then squaring up to firemen for telling them not to light fires. Dogs off lead everywhere. Livestock bothering. Verges knackered. Some lovely chats with lovely people from all over the world. I think we used a drone to help an elderly chap find his missing grandchild near Surprise View around this time. Launched and eyes on took about 45 seconds. It takes me that to get me big boots on.
I made a donation to and bought merchandise from Resistance Rangers in late June. This is the body of rangers and ex rangers in the USA that are battling the torrent of cuts, lies and closures that are overwhelming some of the most iconic landscapes in the world as a result of the Trump government.
A 20-person full on BBQ at Curbar Edge was a ‘highlight of late June. The signs don’t work. There is no viable enforcement option. Derbyshire Constabulary have already as good as stated that they do not have the resources to enforce the Public Space Protection Order for BBQs and fires in open countryside. So, what’s the solution?
The following gallery is June; you can play match the images to the words yourselves …
July
I’m running out of descriptives.
Massive BBQs on the Longshaw Estate that we aided our NT colleagues in sorting out. By massive we mean multi-generational family events with litres of spirits, industrial size BBQs, cannabis, speaker systems and a hostile air of ‘go fuck yourself’ when you try to ask them to respect the notices and the landscape and extinguish the BBQ.
My diary entry for 13 July is fairly typical for the month ….
At 4.50pm I got a phone call about a large BBQ at Longshaw. Dealt with. The trio of heat + alcohol + Class B drugs led to a ‘challenging’ incident. Then to our Ranger Base for a chat about Saturday night. Belly first so we got pizzas. Then round the North part of the patch. The drone picked up something being lit in woodland in Burbage. Three campers. And a fire prepared and ready to light. The conversation winner when they denied lighting anything was showing them the drone footage via my phone of them lighting something. Invited to leave. Then the steep walk out. Getting my breath back I saw mountain rescue vehicles go past and realised I’d missed a call-out alert whilst out of phone coverage (I’m also on the local mountain rescue team). Over the hill to Stanage for a job. Picked up afterwards by a fellow ranger and whilst driving back to ranger base down the A625 we came across a fly-tipping person in a stationary vehicle under the influence of substances changing a damaged wheel. That was sorted and the incident handed to the police. The driver was arrested. Onwards back to Base and we met two ladies in a car on the way home from an 80’s rave at Chatsworth with a puncture. That was sorted. Then almost at Base our access was partly blocked by a large vehicle we believed to be stolen that was called in to the police. Then we actually got to Base and it was Sunday. I might take up knitting.
On the 15th of July it rained.
I think it was Paul Besley that introduced me to the idea of psychogeography. Of a mental map of a place not from maps but from events that one has been involved in there. Combining the ranger volunteering I do with the mountain rescue stuff I oftentimes now mentally navigate round the Peak by ‘incidents’ rather than actual places. And as I sit atop somewhere like Mam Tior or Higger the view below is read by callouts and fire sites and RTCs and livestock events.
27th of July reads ….
BBQ on Houndkirk
•Sheep attacked by dog ivo White Path Moss trig point (Stanage) – a drone search for the sheep and then assistance to DerbysPol in locating the vehicle of the dog owner.
•BBQ on Higger
•Three groups totalling 13 people identified, invited by drone to leave, and monitored leaving Burbage Valley woodland. Fire present. The group included visitors from London and Milton Keynes.
•BBQ Curbar Edge
•Deer involved in an RTA nr Moor Edge Farm. Badly injured animal euthanized by police firearms officer.
•Location and conversation by drone with a camper in a remote location.
•Two tents swaying with sweet loving disturbed by drone and rangers in Lady Cannings woodland due to romancing by a large campfire.
It is no understatement to say that the drone (and the outstanding piloting of it by Sam) was an absolute gamechanger tonight. It allows us to access and observe more places more quickly than we could on foot, it significantly de-risks incidents for the rangers and, moreover, people behave very differently when they are made aware that their actions are being recorded.
Whilst we’d rather a Saturday night passed without incident, they simply don’t anymore on and around the Eastern Moors. Tonight was ‘quite full on’. The teamwork was brilliant’.
29th July was the first of what I think was three or four fires in Tor Woods (Hope Valley) over the next few weeks.
Oh, and at the end of July we held a demo evening on drone capability for local farmers. The more eyes the better.
August
I think I went to Tor Wood. Again. On the first day or so. It cost me a decent power pack that I dropped in the fire.
Any given day. The 10th looked like this …
Lovely sunset – the uninterrupted view from Higger Lodge (when it existed – next to the tree) down the Hope Valley and across to Kinder must have been extraordinary in the evening light.
* BBQ Padley Gorge (no photo)
* Two large tents under Higger Tor
* Two 4×4 vehicles subsequently observed damaging the SSSI adjacent to Houndkirk.
* 7 tents / 9 people from Barnsley having a birthday bonfire in BoleHill. Thank you to DerbysFRS again for their help.
* 5 German tourists having a campfire in Burbage plantation (currently winning the award for ‘Furthest Travelled To Light A Fire In Burbage )
* Cattle-proofing a Porsche size hole in a fence on Sheephill Rd / Houndkirk Moor.
And a couple of non-stop days later I quoted this from the film Zulu, and kept reciting it to myself as I wandered about …
Private Cole: Why is it us? Why us?
Colour Sergeant Bourne: Because we’re here, lad. Nobody else. Just us.
An article in the Guardian in mid-August had the increase in wildfires between 2024 and 2025 at about 600%. The very database that confirms that wildfire totals for 2025 are already 600 times greater than 2024 also clearly articulates the evidenced or presumed cause of ignition. But nobody mentions it.
For the Peak District the great unmentionable is responsible for over 60% of the wildfires.
So where is the really-not-very-hard-to-investigate investigative journalism on the causes ???
Or literally just publish a table of causes and let the reader decide.
Or is the ‘fire’ that that would cause considered by those in ‘power’ to be more trouble than just maintaining the ridiculous silence.
On my south facing tiny and dark tiled balcony in Sheffield the thermometer registered over 40c
A bunch of kids lit a fire in woodland near Ringinglow Rd. The farmer understandably lost his shit with them and had to be herded home by his son. When I said that they would be put on social media as firestarters they suddenly became very apologetic and asked me to speak to ‘one of their mums’ as an alternative to being outed on the internet. It’s all shits and giggles until a camera is pointed at you.
I met ‘Karen’ on the 16th. Inebriated, abusive, unpleasant. Refused to leave Curbar and take her BBQ with her. Took to filming me and threatening to post me on the internet. Vile specimen. We met a ‘Kevin’ a few days later who gave even her a run for her money. Later on the 16th we thought a UFO had landed near Higger Lodge. It was 2 blokes using an actual generator for lighting whilst they put their tent up.
Shall we have an intermission about diet ? Ours is appalling. We are hungry when everything is closed. I mostly forage the out of date shelf in garages. Sam lives on Rustlers microwave burgers. Danny has a weird perversion for boil in the bag camping food. Mostly we just go hungry. For three people there’s a likelihood that we eat more biscuits than any other group of that size in the country. Oftentimes when we’re careering about from fire to fire to fire we realise it’s many many hours since we ate. Occasionally we do PizzElia in Bents Green or Dore Chippy. Every time we try to go healthy we just go hungry.
23 August was another important date for me in the human experiment. We were in Millstone on reports of fire. Two middle aged male local residents walking out of the quarries (after we told them to leave) telling us how disgraceful the behaviour is of ‘them ones’ that light fires in the woodlands and all go up Mam Tor causing a mess is.
One of them had literally seen the Froggatt Edge fire from his home – and went as far as thanking me for being one of the first on scene to help extinguish it.
Aloofness ?
Arrogance ?
Entitlement ?
Despite being found with a large bag of BBQ charcoal they in no way considered themselves to be the same risk as ‘them ones’ that light BBQs. He’d been seen on the drone hiding stuff (BBQ kit) as we arrived.
Is a fire that a local causes not the same as a fire that a visitor causes?
On the 25th it was warm. Above 30c. I had done 2 mountain rescue call outs and then diverted to a fire. A 150m2 section of Hathersage Moor adjacent to a footpath across it magically burst in to flames today. SYFR, NT and EMP got on top of it. The local farmer also sorted water resupply.
We three musketeers from EMP were the last to remain on site. As we were exiting the moor via the gate under Higger there was a grey Mercedes (A Class?) blocking our egress. Horns were tooted and it left. A human in that vehicle had just defecated in the lay-by and also left the soiled paper for us to endure as we exited the moor. We are humbled by their generosity. Unfortunately, we were all utterly chin strapped and nobody got the VRN. The three of us had put something like ~35hrs each in to voluntarily looking after the Eastern Moors over the long weekend. And that’s the thanks we got. August was hard work.
September
There seemed to be a run of fires in Blacka Moor Woods. One of them involved ‘Northants Man’ who had taken his family there (not sure how he found it?) and took great umbrage when told to move. He told us, ‘we weren’t allowed to move him on’. He had lit a fire in bone dry woodland and his kids were asleep in the same woodland. He sat and pointed a red torch at us as some sort of demonstration.
There are places to introduce kids to fire and outdoor cooking but a tinder dry woodland isn’t one of them.
Fly camping. A bout of Covid. Autumn arriving. The red deer getting agitated. I was forced to take about a week off.
On the 28th I was back out like a rat up a drainpipe. Good to be back out once again with the renegade masters. We met a man called ‘Nath-ex-para-regt-from-Sheffield-ready-for-anything’. Which struck us as an odd way to introduce oneself to a stranger at night in a woodland that you’ve just set fire to.
On the 29th someone took umbrage with Curbar Gap car park being unlocked a few minutes later than usual. They smeared faeces (dog or human ?) around the barrier, signage and ticket machine. Which led to us having to lock the car park for longer whilst everything was decontaminated.
October
Leaves falling. Fungi. Storm Amy. In the midst of it I spotted a tent above Millstone. However, frazzled we get we always try to approach situations alive to clues and with an open mind. Encountering hundreds and hundreds of people intent on damaging the landscape makes this openminded approach difficult sometimes – but try we must.
I walked to the tent. I didn’t start from a position of ‘stupid fuc*ing bellend camping out here in this weather’
I started from a position of ‘I bet myself a pound the person in that tent is pitched there in a storm because they need to be’
And he did.
On any other given Saturday I might have asked him to pack up and re-pitch his tent somewhere more discreet and after dusk, but this chap was cold even in his doss bag because of the soaking he got walking there from the station after getting the first train he could after a difficult night shift. He eventually opened the tent door like a field mouse emerging from under a lot of layers, and the first thing he said left me feeling deeply embarrassed for this country …
‘My name is M____t but I have been here in Sheffield for 16 years, here is my home’
To which I replied, ‘mate I couldn’t give a shit if you were orange, pink or red or if you had landed from Antarctica, Africa or Mars, this is NOTHING to do with ethnicity or nationality and everything to do with how you are as a human out here in this god awful weather. How are you doing mate?
He believed that there was a link between ‘where he was from’ and whether he was allowed to be there. He needed sleep, warmth and to be left alone. He was given my phone number and an assurance that if he needed any help before dawn the next day it would arrive.
He needed ‘time out’ and the company of the rain hammering on his tent and the bellow of the stags, before he made his way back to the station at dawn. Then back to the factory. Probably a bit damp and smelly but probably a lot better off for it.
I absolutely get the comments by some mountain rescue teams regarding unnecessary call outs in atrocious weather, but what does need to be borne in mind is that some people can’t choose when they need to escape. Can’t wait for the storm to pass.
As a society we’re far quicker to scapegoat than to care.
Kindness costs nowt.
6th October – See some farmers about recent hare coursing in the Porter and Mayfield Valleys. Repair the arm of a fallen cyclist who had fallen off his bike whilst avoided fly tipped rubbish. Then a request to help out on Ringinglow Rd with what looked like a rave being set up but was a bunch of sound lads that were sound lads (with a speaker business) taking some piccys. Then a picture of a large anxious looking dog on Flask Edge had us over there finding the dog and then the owner and then picking up the owners Dad (off Big Moor) and reuniting the three. Then to Norfolk Arms for a cuppa.
The Norfolk Arms has kept us topped up with tea – often free of charge – all year. Thanks to Mike and the team.
And the rut was in full flow. I kept a nighttime eye out. It won’t be long before one of the long lens camera club that creep up to a stag (despite carrying a 600mm lens) gets gored. The extent to which people will go for more ‘likes’ on social media gets more and more extreme every year. But speak to them (as they’re interfering with the most important annual event in the life cycle of our largest land mammal) and they’ll tell you they love nature. They’ve named all the deer. ‘The deer don’t run away so surely it can’t bother them’.
In early October I made my pilgrimage to Wasdale Shepherds Meet and sponsored some of the prizes. I have been hefted there since I escaped my ‘upbringing’ and went to live in Millican’s Cave just over the Pass. Chatting to farmers and mountain rescuers in the valley their problems are the same as ours. Just tenfold worse. With immense impacts of visitors and weather.
I wrote something in mid-October on the subject of human waste. Piles of it on Baslow Edge. A camper van toilet emptied into a bag and left under Curbar. Piles of it at Burbage North. Health impacting amounts of it in Burbage Woodland. And that’s just the humans. A health risk to other visitors, wildlife and livestock, and a disgusting sight and an issue that local rangers and indeed rangers across several National Parks reckon is becoming more and more frequent.
Humans not picking up after their dogs. In the last week of September well over 5kg of dog shit was picked up and binned on the paths within just a few hundred metres of Curbar Gap. 90% of it unbagged.
The nights closed in. Fireworks became an issue. Cars departing tarmac at speed became an issue (three on Ringinglow Rd in three days). The darkness presents cover for all sorts of behaviours.
We three sat at Bar Brook discussing the detail that has come out of phone ping analysis of visitation in the Peak District (have a look at the amazing ‘Landscape Observatory’ website) when one us said ‘I think it’s been quieter on the Eastern Moors this year …. I bet we haven’t attended 100 fires’ …. We are a very small Team doing evenings and nights on the Eastern Moors. Usually, 2 or 3 of us. Mostly volunteers. We have no recording app and we’re usually dashing from one incident to the next and end up forgetting some of what we do.
…. and so it was that we spent the next 3 hours handwriting details down from WhatsApp group messages, phone photo albums, SMS’s and Instagram about incidents we have attended this year. I’ll post the running totals at the end.
Later in the month we had the privilege of giving a sky burial to a beautiful old stag that had lost in the rut. We can debate sawing its antlers off ‘til the cows come home but personally I think leave it dead for a while first ffs. Someone had hacked them off.
After a discussion between rangers it was decided to move it from where it died due to the proximity of a major footpath. It’ll continue to form a valuable part of the food cycle for many other animals and birds thereabouts.
Beautiful big beast and a privilege to lay it to rest away from the crowds.
Some cannabis dumping and fly tipping and all of a sudden it was November
November
What else? More cars in ditches. The recurring issue of a dog walker nr Clod Hall that likes to ‘walk’ the dogs without getting out the car so smashes and removes the lowest bar of a 5-bar gate so their dog(s) can get under straight from the car boot. Whenever we repair it, it gets smashed again. It’s a funny old world.
Fireworks. Coming out and launching them over livestock and wildlife is a thing. Sitting watching people through a thermal imager that you have asked to refrain from launching them is a thing too. Especially where alcohol is involved. We’re good at waiting and watching. We could get qualifications in it.
The ‘great fire of Ringinglow’ aka the Norfolk Arms bonfire was on the 7th of November. An attendee at those fireworks’ parker her SUV a few hundred metres away from the pub. It’s still there. She knows it’s still there. The police have told her it’s still there. It’s still there.
Colder darker nights. Two coats. Proper boots. Seems to have been wet for months.
The 9th of November saw us drag 4 tents, 6 eggs, a lettuce, 4 airbeds, some peppercorn sauce, a foot pump and a large bottle of baby oil off Mam Tor. Must have been a good night out.
On the 12th I went to my mother’s funeral despite not being invited. Afterwards I drove a few miles to a place that used to be called Castle Eden Walkway Country Park. I used to be a volunteer warden there from, I think, 14 years old and had been going for walks there for as long as I could remember as a kid. The station house stove is still in there. The visitor centre and wardens base are closed and shuttered up nowadays. They’ve built an observatory and a planetarium in the car park. It’s on National Cycle Route 1 now. Roseworth to the left. Sunderland to the right. Just up there on the left in Grindon is a 12th century church dedicated to St Thomas a Beckett. Just up there on the right is Thorpe Wood where, aged 14, I sat in a bush one night with my dad silent and petrified as some men dug a badger sett out. Any noise would doubtless have got us spaded. I learnt lots in them woods and fields. Mostly about escape.
16th was the first day of the year (since last winter) that I donned gloves. You get used to the cold and I’ve never ever been comfortable going from a warm house to a cold outdoors and back again. The heating stays turned off year-round at home. I put more clothes on. As a bairn I couldn’t tolerate heat round at my Nan’s in the winter and would go and stand outside in the garden rather than in a centrally heated living room. Having said that I’ve also had pneumonia twice from over doing the cold so maybe there is flaw in my plan.
Generally quiet. And grey and cold.
An article in the Guardian towards the end of the month stated that ‘The Global Wildfire Information System estimates that by November, wildfires had burned 47,026 hectares (116,204 acres) in 2025 in the UK – the largest area in any year since monitoring began in 2012, and more than double the area burned in the record-breaking summer of 2022’. But nobody did anything.
A fifteen second voiceless video I took of Danny fencing the edge of a SSSI moor (to prevent vehicle access) was watched by 46000 people. Algorithms eh !
And still it rained.
A Fiat 500 driver crashed near Fox Lane and another Fiat 500 driver crashed near Warren Lodge. By any law of physics both drivers ought to have been seriously hurt. Perhaps Fiat 500’s have super powers. Or they are happy sliding along on their roofs more than most cars ?
More fencing. Mostly quiet.
An intermission on footwear – high leg leather ones for summer rangering and firefighting. Albeit the Meindl Dovre aren’t great on rocky ground. After months of buying and trying and selling I bought a pair of Aku with a very long model name which were essentially the Swiss Army issued winter boot. £100 barely used. Haven’t taken them off. And I can leave them on for a MRT call-out as they have massive Vibram soles on them (and are insulated and have a Gore liner). Of the few things that are really important when spending hundreds ? thousands ? of hours outside at night, perhaps having faith in your footwear is up there at or near the top. I’ve got a titanium big toe as well so warm boots are essential.
Lighting is also super important. Have options. Lots of options.
As is trusting your instinct and knowing when to turn round and walk away from a situation. A few years back in the ‘Gazebo Gang’ incident I found a drunkard crawling through woodland towards us armed with a machete. I don’t think he wanted to discuss the weather.
December.
More of the same. We get twitchy when it’s quiet. We presume something is going off that we just haven’t found yet. Oftentimes we’re right. The 4×4 drivers kept us busy with their illegal off-roading. The police got involved on some occasions.
The Fiddlers Elbow bend (a road ben near Burbage) also claimed a Mercedes which in turn claimed the record for the furthest distance a car has ended up on the moor, which, Dear Reader, means the car was travelling a lot faster than the limit. What followed was a bit Benny Hill with various cars, themselves often untaxed or uninsured, arrived to try and extract the Mercedes and getting stuck. We haven’t had any ‘proper’ winter yet but when we do that corner normally collects cars.
As I was stood making a video (on dogs off the lead worrying and attacking pregnant ewes) on day with Nick Denniff (the Stanage North Lees farmer) a boulderer managed to squeeze his car in against the wall on the verge next to us. He wasn’t outside the field gate but he impeded a tractor swinging into it (trailer can’t turn at right angles). He was opposite a car park that was 50% empty and had elected to verge park like many of his fellow climbers and walkers who were going climbing and walking for free and not bothering to contribute to the upkeep of the area by paying a modest fee to park. So, they trashed the verge a bit more. There is no enforcement thereabouts and seemingly no desire to help out the Park by chipping in a few quid.
Some of the nights towards the end of the year were spent observing and recording where the 4x4s went once they couldn’t go where they normally go (to trash legally protected SSSI moorland) because of the fences. Then blocking up their new ‘play’ areas. We did comment a few days ago that we’ll either still be doing this in 10 years or the entirety of Houndkirk will be fenced.
On a trip down in to the Burbage Valley on 28th to extinguish two campfires we are met with horrendous amounts of human waste. Revolting.
On a jaunt out to Mam Tor (on 31st December) this morning the temperature with windchill was -7.8c. Winter may well arrive on the last night of the year.
From tomorrow I start thinking about the return of warming sun and also of the Ouzels who should be hereabouts in maybe 10 or 12 weeks …
End Points
A few things from the year …
Whilst nature has no vote value to government, it, and those charged and funded with caring for it, will continue to be pillaged. Nothing will change until it is too late.
The only thing that will kickstart the appropriate preparedness for the impact of wildfires in the UK is when they start killing people and decimating towns and villages. Until then nothing will change. By then we will be a decade behind in education and preparedness.
The year above doesn’t include the thousands of lovely chats with lovely people. Sadly, these are often fleeting and quickly forgotten as I dashed to the next incident.
Setting aside a few night hikers, leave no trace campers, headtorch wearing fell runners and amateur astrologists, my experience is that the night in the eastern side of the Peak District largely plays host to people that wish to do its landscapes and nature harm. Whilst constabularies are defunded the ‘natural’ place for police to operate is where incidents and criminals are harming the public. That is generally not on moorland and remote places – hence the likelihood of those harming landscapes and nature coming in to contact with the police gets less and less. Catch 22.
In the cold winter quiet nights, we yearn for the chaotic summer nights. And vice versa.
Thanks to Danny and Sam for being out throughout what I estimate to be somewhere between 1000 and 1500 hours. The laughs. The anger. The adrenaline. The inability to comprehend. The chippy teas.
The trying to look after the place come what may. Sometimes, no, a lot of the time, it feels like an impossible task with the odds very very heavily stacked against us. We can but try.
Thanks to the other rangers for all their help too.
Over the holidays a book appeared in my letterbox. It is called ‘Interrupted Journeys’ by Adrian Potter. It is about a bloke that dedicates most of his retired life to looking after wildlife in Yorkshire. The person that bought me it thought that it was either by me under a pseudonym or about me. Neither. But it is very good.
Maybe I could locally publish this article?
Tally
The following numbers are but estimates.
They cover the area of the Eastern Moors and outlying areas (mostly covered in the above article)
The numbers DO NOT include incidents with drones, incidents with deer, incidents with dogs off leads near wildlife or livestock (too numerous to record).
It is my belief that the numbers are about 80% correct
Fires and Fireworks – 87
BBQs – 98
Flytipping – 13
Drugs and alcohol related – 13
Illegal off-roading (SurRon and 4×4) – 48
Other – …. Literally hundreds … from mortar finds to RTCs to dumping human ashes to raves.
Postscript
I had a chat with a close friend the other day about whether any of this past year (as a volunteer ranger) counts for anything or has been worth it. It has cost me a lot of money and a lot of sleep. What is the metric for ‘worth it’ ?
The reply I received was ‘look at the number of fires and BBQs the three of you have stopped … well over a hundred in total … if a handful of them had caught the moorland then the places you love would have been devastated’.
Fair comment.
It has been a hard year.
I also had a full time day job and also did over 100 call-outs as a mountain rescue team member during the year.
Sleep was often minimal.
Mind how you go ….
©️ Tomo Thompson 2026