Sunday at Bill's Mother's: 2nd August 2026
Damping down the fires. Call out for Curlew wall. Creature counts.
Morning. More on Peak District moorland fire risks and solutions today, following yesterday’s post for our friends at The Sheffield Tribune. We also have a call out for a city centre building to feature a spectacular mural of our whooping and whistling fellow Sheffielder, the Curlew. And a look at the recent bioblitz and new funding for the Shire Brook Valley.
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Fire Country
The fires we can expect on Peak District moorland are going to be very different now.
(My piece with colleague Dan Hayes for the Sheffield Tribune yesterday was lauded as “Best piece I have read on this topic,” by one kind reader.)
The dynamics of moorland fires are different in our new climate, I was told, with intense, hotter and longer fires, and firestorm events sending sparks further and higher.
“30 years ago, fire and rescue services would say, ok, let’s look at the forecast and where the fire’s travelling,” I was told by a land manager who’s been helping conserve our landscape for much of his lifetime.
“So they might have said, right, we’ll need to contain it on this side, and actually it’ll burn out by Wednesday because there’s going to be rain, or it’s going to go up hard against a bit of scrubby wet woodland.“
The difference just now, he added, is that any rain shower we get will quickly evaporate, and once-reliable natural firebreaks, like a sappy hedge in full leaf, will be a lot drier than it was in the past.
Danny Udall from the Eastern Moors Partnership explained how our new moorland fires are becoming so hot and intense that we won’t be able to send people to fight them.
And in dusty summers, how will we manage furious fires by calling out expensive helicopter water carriers, when that water will be scarcer than ever too?
Targeted drone water drops will be part of the answer, Danny thinks, but the landscape itself will need to be the primary firefighting tool.
The old moorland, scarred by acid rain from Manchester’s industrial revolution, along with overgrazing by sheep and management for Red Grouse (and their main food crop of young heather shoots) has left us a landscape dominated by flammable heather and molinia moor grass.
Conservation agencies like the Eastern Moors Partnership and Moors for the Future are doing their best to recreate the ancient blanket bogs that were here before, and will now increase biodiversity and help us rewet the moors for the future world.
With accelerating hot summers, and more and more people visiting the Peak District, Danny Udall talks about short and long term solutions to local moorland fires.
In the short term, we’ll have to curtail and steer fires using cut fire breaks (burned fire breaks tend to increase that incendiary molinia grass), and we’ll need to bring in water-carrying drone swarms and robot firefighting machines.
We also need practical means to prosecute human fire starters, with Public Space Protection Orders across our fire risk areas. (Unlike the councils at High Peak, Derbyshire Dales and Staffordshire Moorlands, Sheffield council has no PSPO in place yet to curtail fire starters on the Sheffield moors).
But the long term solution is the landscape itself. Moorland fire professionals talk about fuel load, fuel type and fuel arrangement, Danny says.
Dry vegetation is fuel load, but fuel type can vary: shrubs and broadleaf trees are a less incendiary fuel than molinia moor grass and heather, while wet willow woodland and sphagnum bogs are effectively fire breaks.
Fuel arrangement is how all this sits in the landscape, potentially to keep fires from spreading. So a patchwork of habitats, with dams and sphagnum bogs, wet woodlands and mixtures of shrubs and bilberries and heather will all help us survive in the hot days to come.
If you see a fire, or smoke, on the moors or open countryside, call 999 immediately with a location, such as a What3Words, or grid reference.
Once you’ve done that, you can also record the location at the Peak District Fire Reporter app, to help gather data on fire types and air pollution.
Curlew Calling
The city’s Curlews will have mostly left for the seaside now, after such a dry summer. Just bear that in mind for a moment: most places in England (never mind most cities), see these strange birds as haunting rarities.
But from March to July, at an elevation a few hundred yards above the city centre, and west a few miles, we all have a good chance of seeing a Curlew, or hearing the long beaked bubbling and eerie piping song of a bird on the UK’s endangered red-list.
Curlews are a regular breeding visitor to the moors and high farmland around Sheffield. And when the birds return here next spring, supporters of the Curlew Action group have identified Sheffield as the ideal host for a new mural to celebrate the bird’s affection for the city.
Ann Ellis, a local supporter of Curlew Action, is seeking out a suitable prominent building in or near the city centre to host the mural, to be painted by artist of endangered birds, Mark Anthony, of ATM streetart.
The aim is to have the mural completed for World Curlew Day next April, at a spot where thousands of people will see it.
The gritstone moors and moorland edges surrounding Sheffield provide perfect habitats for Curlews to nest, says Ann, and Sheffield and the surrounding Peak District are regionally important areas for a bird under serious threat across the British Isles (which hosts a quarter of the world’s Eurasian Curlew population).
But many people living here are unaware of the importance of Sheffield to its continued existence, she adds.
Curlew Action have recently unveiled a mural in Stroud, also by ATM street art, depicting a Curlew in its meadow habitat. Sheffield’s mural will celebrate the bird on city moorland.
The Sheffield building chosen cannot be listed, or in an area requiring planning permission in order to fit into the planned timescale, says Ann. But if you or your organisation own a building that might fit the bill, she says to get in touch (at ann52ellis@gmail.com) for a chat about the idea.
“A large iconic bird of the Sheffield area would be an amazing sight and art installation for our Outdoor City,” she says, “and would bring the plight of the Curlew to everyone’s attention.”
Creature Counting
We had 11 rabbits in the amphitheatre, says Meghan Tipping. We saw a Grass Snake and three Pipistrelle bats.
“And we had 177 moths, from 67 species,” says Sean Ashton, as we all gasp at a huge beast resting in a plastic collection jar. It’s a monster Poplar Hawk Moth, and looks as if it would try and eat your thumb if it escaped. “A legend of a moth,” Sean concedes.
He’s more interested in a tiny Italian Bark Moth, a rarity for Yorkshire. “It’s a macro moth, that feeds on the fungus behind bark,” he says.
This year’s Shire Brook Valley bioblitz sought species of all kinds across the nature reserve a couple of weeks ago. The bark and hawk moths, snakes, Thick-Legged Flower Beetles, dragonflies, damselflies and albino knapweeds all seemed to have burst out to celebrate the site’s recently concluded £1.3 million Species Survival Fund Project, which ended this summer.
Ranger Nell Dixon introduces a Lesser Swallow Prominent moth, with folded wings staring out at us like the face of an angry antelope, before rushing off to some flowering grasses. She’s in her element.
The humans at the bioblitz were also celebrating the site’s first national Green Flag award, an international scheme to mark well-managed outdoor spaces that actively serve their local communities. It’s the first of Sheffield’s Green Flag sites on the east of the city, says the council’s woodland and countryside manager for the area, Tom Broadhead.
Meanwhile, Pete Brown, from Sheffield Bird Study Group and the RSPB, is gathering participants for a summer bird walk. Spring or autumn are better, he forewarns us. At this time of year, birds aren’t singing and they’re often moulting, so can be hard to identify. So they might well keep out of our way in embarrassment.
We peer at a small brown bird in the distance. “Looks like a scabby Robin,” says one of the onlookers. “Tick a lick” says our keen-eared walk leader. “Goldfinches.” A flock of pigeons in close formation fly over in the distance. “Racing Pigeons. They don’t count,” says Pete.
Over the next hour we traverse the meadows and ponds, the rewilding spoil heaps, and young woodlands rising from the gravel of industries past, and pick up well over 30 species, despite the elusive summer birdlife.
We learn that Coal Tits go twitchee, that Sparrowhawks flap, then glide, flap, then glide, and that Stock Doves go oooooh like Frankie Howerd.
Meanwhile, the nature recovery at Shire Brook goes on with a new £19,000 Awards for All project starting this autumn , and the hope of a much larger project led by Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust across eastern Sheffield and Rotherham maybe coming soon.
And in November, Pete Brown will be back to lead a new tour, when the Robins will have lost their shy scabbiness.
On 9th August, the nature reserve will host a family Spectrum of Stories event with craft activities and the opportunity to share your Shire Brook stories and memories.
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More What’s On Out There (from Sunday 2nd August)
A tiny selection from our (regularly updated) What’s On Out There news and listings post. Full version for full members, preview (& this week) for all at the link above.
Sun 2nd - Manor Lodge Botany Tour
Mon 3rd - SRWT Volunteering - Crabtree Ponds
Tues 4th - SRWT Wild Play - Ecclesall Woods (£8.50)
Weds 5th - Sheffield Ramblers Walks - Rother Valley & Treeton (12.5m)
Thurs 6th - Green City Action Grimesthorpe community allotment
Fri 7th - CycleBoost cycle training - women only confidence & improvers, Endcliffe Park
Sat 8th - Sheffield CTC Cycle Rides - Leger Lakes
It would make my Sunday if you say at this point, yes, maybe I could afford less than the cost of a Millhouses flat white a month to help keep this publication going. We’re 99% of the way to our next target of 350 paying readers.
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I remember getting back from Scotland in 1976 to find Ringinglow Moor on fire; and spending 2-3 days helping to fight it. But even when it looked out it was still burning down in deep cracks in the peat; and it was only when the weather broke and we had heavy rain that it was finally out. It took nearly ten years for the moor to start recovering from that.