Rewetting as fire infrastructure: 966 wildfires, and 75% of UK wetlands already drained

Firefighters spent three weeks on a wildfire in the hills above Blaenavon in south Wales that spread across more than 4,000 hectares, or 9,900 acres, and around 200 military personnel were called in to support exhausted crews as further fires broke out across the south Wales valleys ^[1][2]. What makes this an infrastructure story rather than a weather story is the fuel: over 75% of the UK's bogs, fens, marshes and other wetlands have been dug up, drained or destroyed since 1700, stripping the landscape of much of its capacity to hold water, according to an analysis published by phys.org ^[3].

The season provides the denominator. Firefighters in England and Wales had responded to 966 wildfires by 10 August, of which 458 came in July alone ^[4] - roughly 47% of the total in a single month ^[5].

The mechanism is unglamorous. In a functioning bog, waterlogged ground stops dead plants from fully decomposing, so they accumulate as peat ^[6]. Drain it, the water table drops, and the peat and vegetation dry out, which produces more fuel during prolonged heat ^[7]. Once flames reach peat, they can smoulder underground and resurface elsewhere, which the analysis identifies as one of the problems crews faced at Blaenavon ^[8]. That is the operational point: a drained peatland is not just more flammable, it is harder to declare out.

The interventions described are cheap-looking earthworks rather than capital projects. Old drainage ditches and eroded gullies can be blocked with small dams or banks called bunds, bare peat can be stabilised and replanted, and sphagnum moss reintroduced ^[9]. Sphagnum can hold 20 times or more its own weight in water ^[10]. Wetlands can also be recreated by reconnecting rivers to floodplains and restoring wet woodland, ponds and shallow pools ^[11].

The evidence offered is early and partly anecdotal. On Holcombe Moor in the West Pennines north of Manchester, around 3,000 crescent-shaped "scallop bunds" were dug in 2021 with low-impact excavators, followed by another 700 in 2024 ^[12] - 3,700 in total ^[13]. Within five years many of the original bunds held sphagnum and were starting to resemble natural bog pools, and monitoring during the 2025 drought suggested the bunded areas stayed wetter for longer than unrestored peat ^[14]. For a fire actually stopping, the analysis cites one case: at Golticlay in northern Scotland, a June 2018 wildfire moved through forestry and halted when it reached recently restored peatland where the water table had been raised ^[15]. One fire is not a fire-behaviour dataset, and the Holcombe result is described as suggestive.

The timescales split usefully. Forming new peat and fully restoring the ecosystem takes decades or centuries, but the water-retention benefit that matters for fire can start within a few years ^[16]. That is the argument for treating targeted rewetting near communities, forestry and other high-risk ground as part of wildfire strategy rather than as habitat work ^[17].

What to watch: whether restoration is sited by fire risk rather than by grant availability; whether the next drought produces comparative burn data from bunded versus unrestored moor; and whether any UK fire service starts costing rewetting against the alternative of three weeks of crews and 200 soldiers ^[2]. The source gives no cost per hectare, which is the number that will decide this.