Rural: Wildlife returns to the bog

Shropshire's peat lands, once dug for commercial gain, are now a bustling haven, writes Malcolm Smith

Standing in the middle of Fenn's Moss on the Shropshire/Welsh border, with cotton sedge wafting white in the evening breeze, teal flighting on to pools and blue dragonflies and a myriad of other insects flitting across a sponge of red and yellow bog mosses, it's incredible to think that all of this could have ended up in Growbags.

That is no exaggeration. When Dr Joan Daniels was first employed, in May 1991, to manage the Moss as a National Nature Reserve (NNR) for the Countryside Council for Wales and English Nature, 350 acres were being mechanically cut to harvest horticultural peat. The company concerned had obtained planning consent to dig the black lifeblood out of this wetland and had rented a further 300 acres that they could have exploited later. A devastating network of peat-cutting ditches was rapidly draining the Moss of its vital rainwater, killing its animal and plant life at the same time.

"When I first saw the Moss, it was like a desert, there had been so much drainage and peat cutting," recalls Joan Daniels. "A myriad of drains had been opened to take the water away. Every 11 yards of bare, stacked peat had a two-yard strip of vegetation left high and dry above the falling water table. It went across the Moss like this almost as far as you could see."

Not now. This huge Moss - Fenn's, Whixall, Bettisfield, Wem and Cadney Mosses, to give the full local title - is a peatland success story. Instead of ending up in the potting shed to grow geraniums, the peat hereabouts will stay where nature intended it to.

All of the remaining Moss (it once covered perhaps 5,000 acres), plus some marginal land draining on to it, is designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and extends to 2,387 acres. Of this, 1,421 acres is NNR, while the Shropshire Wildlife Trust has around 80 acres on Wem Moss. The rest of the site is privately owned, though some of it has protective management agreements. The future of the bulk of the NNR was recently secured for the long term when the Countryside Council for Wales announced that it had bought a 99-year lease on the land.

Since Joan Daniels has been there, her team of four estate workers (all of whom, ironically, previously worked for the peat-cutting company) supplemented by gangs of volunteers, have been damming the vast number of drains - usually by plugging them with peat - and clearing much of the birch scrub that had grown up under the artificially drier conditions.

A multitude of bog mosses, cotton sedge and much rarer plants such as the pale-pink-flowered rosemary and the scimitar-leafed, yellow-flowering bog asphodel have burgeoned as water levels have naturally re-wetted the formerly arid peat, rising by as much as 6ft.

With the return of the native peatland plants have come the wetland insects, no fewer than 1,700 different species of them. Among the special residents are the orange-brown large heath butterfly, a spectacular dragonfly (the rarest of several dragonfly species here) called the white-faced darter, and the raft spider, a hunter that sits on floating water plants.

Birds, too, are on the up. The numbers of breeding pairs of curlew, lapwing, skylark and meadow pipit have all increased because they can now utilise more of the Moss. In winter, it's again full of wildfowl and waders - mallard, teal, snipe. New species such as spotted redshank are visiting, while uncommon birds of prey such as the hobby (a falcon) and marsh harrier are starting to check out the site's credentials.

In the turnaround from peat exploitation to peat conservation, the five centuries or so of human use of the Mosses hasn't been forgotten. Remains of six peat processing works, including the only on-site British example of a diesel engine powering peat presses, are preserved for posterity to make the historic link between the wetland and its past exploitation. There are even remains to be found of larger-scale conflicts. The Mosses were used in both world wars for rifle ranges and in the Second World War as a practice bombing range, and as part of an elaborate decoy site to distract German bombers away from Liverpool. In the event, Liverpool suffered appallingly but the Mosses got away without being ignited.

Surrounded by intensive, flat farmland with dairy and beef cattle, crops such as maize and oilseed rape, and by woodland, Fenn's Moss is something of an enigma. It is virtually invisible from every direction and, until you are out in the middle of the place, it is difficult to comprehend that such a large wetland - at least by British standards - is being re- created in the midst of some of the most intensively farmed lowlands.

This type of wetland is now all too rare. Most has been drained and converted to farmland, or dug up to enrich millions of gardens at the expense of the plants it should naturally nurture. There are perhaps 25,000 acres left in Britain (only a 20th of what there was in 1850), and Fenn's Moss comprises about 13 per cent of it. Not only that, but it is the third largest example of this type of wetland remaining in Britain.

To visit Fenn's Moss you need a permit from the site manager, for safety reasons. Or join one of the free guided walks on the site, on the last Sundays in June and July. Details from Dr Joan Daniels, English Nature, Manor House, Moss Lane, Whixall, Shropshire (01948 880 362)