Apparently the British Mountaineering Council and Moors for the Future are combining to fund and recruit the ‘first *dedicated* wildfire ranger for the Peak District’s Eastern Moors’.
It says so here ….
Note the use of the word dedicated.
The dictionary defines ‘dedicated’ thus;
So if the soon-to-be-appointed Wildfire Ranger is ‘the first dedicated’ one on the Eastern Moors of the Peak District, WTAF were Danny. Sam and me doing last year ?
(*dear reader there’s a 14000 word answer to that question here )
On several occasions we volunteered more hours in a weekend extinguishing BBQs and fires than this new post will work in a week.
And 2 of the 3 of us had full time day jobs on top of a massive voluntary contribution to fire prevention and fire extinguishing.
And i managed to squeeze in about 105 call-outs with the local mountain rescue team as well.
And on many occasions we were left hungry, dehydrated and utterly exhausted night after night after night by the incessant tempo of incidents.
I’m quite certain that although i did get a small fuel allowance about every 3 months from the RSPB (*which by the way is only 50% of the reimbursement per mile that a salaried member of the RSPB gets 🤷♂️) being a Fire Ranger last year cost me at least a few thousand pounds out of my own pocket.
And i am aware that both the aforementioned organisations have read and socialised my account of being a fire warden on the Eastern Moors last year, and indeed i know they’re actively trying to get hold of me to get my buy-in and support for the new role.
But why would they be doing that if we three weren’t ‘dedicated’ enough ?
So they’ve read what i wrote about what we three did, and not one of them thought … hang on a minute, perhaps the use of the word ‘dedicated’ is inappropriate here.
Language matters.
Anyway, here’s a little photo-recap of the year in which we seemingly just weren’t dedicated enough …..
Anyway, enough of the semantics, we’ve got a whole new fire season to prep for. First job to sort is trying on the new wildfire ranger PPE for size ….
©️ ThePathLessTravelled2026