Black Hill no longer black?

Back in April I psyched myself up to tackle the notoriously peaty Black Hill for the first time. Everything that I had read and all the pictures I had seen suggested that the summit of Black Hill was like no other.

In his Pennine Way companion Alfred Wainwright described Black Hill in the following words,

"The broad top really is black. It is not the only fell with a summit of peat, but no other shows such a desolate and hopeless quagmire to the sky. This is peat naked and unashamed."

What I found was in fact very different.

At the time I wrote, "I expected almost the entire summit plateau to be bare peat with very little vegetation. In fact this was not the case and I was surprised at how much grass and heather there was." Compare for example the picture I took below of the last stretch of the paved Pennine Way leading to the summit with a picture on the V-G website that was taken from a similar position back in 2004.




I finished my log of the walk by writing, "perversely I was slightly disappointed that Black Hill did not offer more of a challenge underfoot though no doubt if it had been the quagmire I'd expected I would have thought otherwise." Even taking into account of the dry conditions at the time I was still somewhat baffled about what the fuss was about.



Yesterday, a few chapters into Andrew Bibby's excellent book 'The Backbone of England' I found the answer to this puzzle. Bibby devotes the entire third chapter of his book to Black Hill and the moorland restoration work being done by an organisation called 'Moors for the Future'. Their aim is to not only halt the peat erosion in places like Black Hill and Bleaklow but to revive the blanket bogs that were once the main feature of these hills.

One method of doing this is by laying anti-erosion mats made out of jute mesh. I saw plenty of evidence of these, especially on the route down from the summit over Tooleyshaw Moss. Another method employed is reseeding the area with grass and spraying it with liquified sphagnum moss. Interestingly the book quotes one of the leaders of the project as saying, "I'm very confident: we'll turn Black Hill green in a couple of years". The book was first published in 2008 and from my experience it looks like that confidence was not misplaced.




I'm glad that for me the mystery of Black Hill has been solved. However, while the activities of 'Moors for the Future' are entirely laudable I cannot help but feel I've missed out on something. Wainwright's description of Black Hill continues,

"in the flutings and ripplings of the dunes ... a certain strange beauty, a patterned sculpturing beyond the skill of man, must, however, be conceded."

The changes to Black Hill mean that I will probably never experience Black Hill in this way.