Client: South West Peatland Partnership
Sector: Conservation, Environmental, Documentary
The Living Layer: Restoring Britain’s Broken Peatlands
A year-long documentary capturing the urgent mission to restore Southwest England’s damaged peatlands—one of the largest landscape-scale restoration projects in UK history.
Peatlands are the unsung giants of carbon storage. Globally, they hold twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined. In the UK alone, peatlands store around 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon. But here’s the problem: 80% of Britain’s peatlands are damaged and degrading—silently releasing that ancient carbon back into the atmosphere.
The South West Peatland Partnership commissioned Here Now Films to document their ambitious mission to restore over 2,600 hectares of degraded peatland across Dartmoor, Exmoor, Bodmin Moor and West Penwith. This wasn’t a quick turnaround brand film—it was a year embedded in the landscape, capturing the full cycle of restoration work from planning through execution.
The Brief
The Partnership needed more than a legacy piece for board meetings. They needed a film that could communicate the scale and urgency of peatland restoration to multiple audiences: potential funders, partner organisations, policymakers, and the general public.
The challenge was significant: how do you make people care about a landscape feature most have never heard of? How do you convey the alarming reality that our national parks are quietly falling apart—while also inspiring hope that restoration is possible?
“These are amazing places. On a day like this, coming up here—it renews the spirit. That’s real. It’s a hard thing to value, but it is extremely important.”
— Conrad Sherlock, Restoration Manager, South West Peatland Partnership
Our Approach
More Than a Year in the Making
Peatland restoration work happens between August and March, outside the ground-nesting bird season. That meant filming through autumn storms, winter freezes, and spring thaws—often in conditions that pushed both crew and equipment to their limits. The team worked in temperatures as low as -14°C, hiking to remote sites inaccessible by vehicle.
This wasn’t just about capturing pretty landscapes. It was about documenting the full reality of large-scale conservation: the logistics of coordinating 22 partner organisations, the specialised machinery that exerts less ground pressure than a human footprint, the helicopter operations airlifting materials to inaccessible sites.
Capturing the Science
We worked closely with the Partnership’s scientific team to visualise concepts that are inherently difficult to communicate. What does it mean when a water table drops? How does a drainage ditch from the 1800s continue to damage habitat today? Why does sphagnum moss matter?
Through detailed interviews with ecologists, restoration managers, and partnership coordinators—combined with macro photography, drone surveys, and time-lapse sequences—we built a visual language for peatland systems that makes the invisible visible.
Finding the Emotional Core
Beyond the science, we sought the human stories driving this work. Restoration managers who light up when describing dunlin returning to breed after 97 years of absence. Contractors working in impossible conditions because they believe in what they’re doing. Partnership coordinators juggling the complexity of aligning 22 organisations toward a common goal.
The film balances urgent environmental messaging with genuine moments of wonder—the strange beauty of a healthy bog, the satisfaction of seeing water pool behind a newly installed dam, the first sphagnum moss colonising a bare peat face.
The Impact
“The Living Layer” is being submitted to documentary film festivals worldwide, positioning the South West Peatland Partnership’s work on an international stage. Beyond festivals, the film serves as a cornerstone communications asset for the Partnership’s ongoing funding efforts and public engagement work.
The restoration work continues. There are still thousands of hectares to restore, decades of damage to reverse. But as the film captures, the work of several lifetimes has begun.