How Here Now Films embedded with the South West Peatland Partnership to capture one of the UK’s largest landscape-scale restoration projects.
There’s a climate crisis unfolding beneath our feet that most of us have never heard of.
Britain’s peatlands—ancient ecosystems that have been quietly storing carbon for thousands of years—are falling apart. Deep gullies carve through our national parks. Carbon that took millennia to accumulate is bleeding into the atmosphere and poisoning our rivers. An estimated 80% of the UK’s peatlands are damaged. And almost nobody is talking about it.
“The Living Layer” is our attempt to change that.
Over the course of a year, Here Now Films embedded with the South West Peatland Partnership to document one of the largest peatland restoration projects in UK history. What began as a commission to capture restoration work across Dartmoor, Exmoor, and Bodmin Moor became something more—a meditation on patience, partnership, and the radical hope required to repair landscapes on a generational timescale.
What Is Peat, and Why Should Anyone Care?
Let’s start with the basics, because most people—ourselves included, before this project—don’t really know what peat is.
“Peat is not soil,” explains Conrad Sherlock, Restoration Manager for the South West Peatland Partnership. “Soil has a high proportion of mineral content—ground-up bedrock. Peat is composed of very high levels of organic matter. Dead plants, leaves, flowers—all the material that would normally rot and release its carbon back into the atmosphere.”
The difference is water. In a healthy peatland, dead plant material falls into waterlogged pools that are highly acidic and low in oxygen. Under these conditions, organic matter doesn’t decompose. Instead, it accumulates—millimetre by millimetre, year after year, century after century—forming deep layers of peat that lock away carbon indefinitely.
“These systems rely on being wet,” Conrad continues. “And there’s this key plant—sphagnum moss. It’s what people call an ecosystem engineer. It stores huge amounts of water, keeps conditions acidic, and creates the perfect environment for peat to form. In a healthy bog, it will carpet the entire system.”
The numbers are staggering. In the UK alone, peatlands store around 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon—more than all the forests in the UK, France, and Germany combined. Globally, peatlands hold twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests put together, despite covering just 3% of the Earth’s land surface.
But here’s the problem: when peatlands are damaged—when drainage ditches are dug, when the water table drops, when erosion takes hold—that ancient carbon store begins to unravel.
“As soon as the water table drops, the peat dries out,” Conrad explains. “It releases carbon into the atmosphere. It makes it difficult for sphagnum to survive. And it triggers a cycle of erosion that just keeps getting worse.”
The estimates vary, but damaged peatlands are thought to contribute between 5-7% of the UK’s total annual CO2 emissions. That’s not nothing. And unlike a forest fire or a melting glacier, it’s happening invisibly, beneath landscapes that most visitors assume are pristine wilderness.
The Scale of the Damage
George, one of the Partnership’s field officers, has spent years surveying erosion features across Dartmoor. His descriptions are sobering.
“When you come across some of these gullies, it can be really quite shocking,” he tells us, standing at the edge of a peat cutting that drops three metres into black, crumbling earth. “You have this image of national parks as wild, pristine places. Then you get here and see massive chunks of peat just falling in and washing away.”
The damage has multiple causes. Tin mining in centuries past. Agricultural drainage ditches dug to “improve” the land for grazing. Military activity—Dartmoor has been a firing range for 200 years, and unexploded ordnance has blown apart sections of peatland. Overgrazing. Burning. Climate change accelerating the whole process.
“What the tin streamers did was basically dig out the bottom of these valleys,” George explains. “It’s like pulling the plug on a bathtub. Once that material is gone, the peat above it starts to crack, dry out, and collapse. The gullies get wider and deeper. And it just keeps going.”
Morag Maybury, the Partnership’s Project Manager, frames the challenge in human terms: “We’re looking to restore around 2,600 hectares by 2025, working across Exmoor, Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor, and West Penwith. It’s a massive geographical area. We’ve got 22 partner organisations involved. And we can only work between August and March, outside the ground-nesting bird season. So we’re out there in autumn, winter, in conditions that would send most people home.”
The Work
Peatland restoration is not glamorous. It involves specialised machinery—six-tonne diggers mounted on wide plastic tracks that exert less ground pressure than a human footprint. It involves helicopters airlifting timber dams to sites too remote to access by vehicle. It involves teams working in horizontal rain, in freezing fog, in temperatures that dropped to -4°C during our filming.
The techniques vary depending on the damage. For drainage ditches, the team installs wooden or peat dams to block the flow of water and raise the water table. For larger erosion gullies, they use a combination of timber structures and “reprofiling”—reshaping the peat to slow water movement and encourage vegetation to return. For the most severe damage, they’re essentially rebuilding the hydrology of the landscape from scratch.
“It’s really specialised work,” Morag notes. “Specialised machinery, specialised contractors. It’s taken years to build up the pool of people who can do this properly. And our sites are remote—getting machinery, materials, and staff to these locations is a logistical challenge every single time.”
But the most important element isn’t the machinery. It’s patience.
“These systems took thousands of years to form,” Conrad reflects. “We’re not going to fix them in a season. The hope is that the bog slowly, slowly, slowly starts to support itself. We’re providing the initial intervention—the kickstart. But the real restoration happens over decades, over lifetimes.”
The People
What struck us most during our year of filming wasn’t the statistics or the techniques. It was the people.
There’s Conrad, who can spend twenty minutes explaining the life cycle of sphagnum moss with the enthusiasm of someone describing their favourite film. There’s George, shin-deep in a peat gully, cataloguing damage with meticulous care while rain runs down his face. There’s Morag, coordinating 22 partner organisations with the calm pragmatism of someone who’s learned that conservation is as much about people as it is about nature.
“Everyone has this amazing dedication and love of what they’re doing,” Morag tells us. “They want to see those changes—for climate, for biodiversity. So they’re willing to go out there whatever the weather. Rain, shine, hail, snow. Just get the work done.”
Conrad puts it differently: “On a day like this, coming up here—it renews the spirit. These are amazing places. That’s real. It’s hard to value, but it’s extremely important.”
And then there are the moments that make it all worthwhile. Conrad describes one with barely contained emotion: “One of the first sites we worked on had a 97-year absence of breeding dunlin. They returned to breed three or four years ago. I’ve worked in nature conservation for twenty years, and most of the time you’re fighting for meagre gains. Something returning after 97 years—it makes the whole thing worthwhile. It really just lights you up.”
Why We Made This Film
Here Now Films was founded with a simple mission: to bring cinema-quality storytelling to stories that matter. When the South West Peatland Partnership approached us in 2023, we saw an opportunity to do exactly that.
“The Partnership needed more than a legacy piece for board meetings,” explains Ed Smit, our Managing Director and Producer on the project. “They needed something that could communicate urgency to funders, engage the public, and give their partners something they’d be proud to share. But more than that, they needed to make people care about something most have never heard of.”
We committed to a year-long production—unusual for a branded documentary, but essential for capturing the full cycle of restoration work. We filmed through autumn storms, winter freezes, and the brief windows of summer. We hiked to sites inaccessible by vehicle, shot drone footage in conditions that pushed our equipment to its limits, and conducted intimate interviews with the people doing the work.
Creative Director Ollie Couch led the production as both director and cinematographer. “I wanted the film to feel like the landscape—patient, accumulative, building toward something,” he explains. “Peat doesn’t work in dramatic moments. It works in millimetres per year. The film needed to honour that timescale while still being compelling to watch.”
The Bigger Picture
“The Living Layer” isn’t just about Southwest England. It’s about a global crisis that’s only beginning to receive the attention it deserves.
Peatlands exist across the world—from the Flow Country in Scotland to the tropical peatlands of Indonesia, from the permafrost bogs of Siberia to the páramos of South America. Many are under threat from drainage, agriculture, and climate change. And as they degrade, they shift from carbon sinks to carbon sources, accelerating the very warming that’s destroying them.
The UK has committed to restoring 35,000 hectares of peatland by 2025. The South West Peatland Partnership’s 2,600-hectare target is one piece of that puzzle. But the work extends far beyond any single project or deadline.
“It’s the work of several lifetimes,” Conrad told us, standing on a moorland ridge as the sun broke through the clouds. “And that’s intimidating. But it’s also extraordinarily exciting.”
About the Production
“The Living Layer” was produced by Here Now Films for the South West Peatland Partnership. The film is currently being submitted to documentary festivals worldwide.
Credits:
- Director / Cinematographer: Oliver Couch
- Producer: Edward Smit
- Executive Producer: Justine Read (South West Peatland Partnership)
Contributors:
- Conrad Sherlock, Restoration Manager
- Morag Maybury, Partnership Manager
- George, Project Officer
Locations: Dartmoor, Exmoor, Bodmin Moor, West Penwith
Production Period: August 2023 – Summer 2024
Get In Touch
For screening enquiries, festival submissions, or to discuss how Here Now Films can help tell your organisation’s story, contact us at ed@herenow.film.
