Wildfire burning one month on is ‘the size of a small town’

ByIsaac Ashe

East Midlands

As darkness set in over the Peak District one Wednesday night in June, calls started to come in to Derbyshire’s fire service over smoke starting to rise from the moorland overlooking the town.

More than a month on, the Tintwistle Moor fire is now a sprawling, smouldering blaze the size of a small town, which can be seen from space.

Declared a major incident on 13 July, it has come in tandem with a prolonged spell of hot, dry weather that shows little sign of easing soon, pushing the country’s firefighting resources to their limits.

Now Dr Kirsten Lees, environmental sciences lecturer, specialising in zero carbon at the University of Derby, has told the BBC Tintwistle is on a par with the biggest wildfires ever seen in England – and it’s still burning.

When questioned about her assertion the fire could be one of the largest in recent memory in England, she said: “It may well be, yes.”

She added: “Honestly, it’s upsetting and it’s really scary.

“In the most recent years, we had Saddleworth in 2018. We had Fylingdales up in the North York Moors last year. And this is comparable in scale to both of those.

“My estimate is that it is about the size of a small town. As this is not out yet, we don’t know how much bigger it’s going to get.”

Analysis of data from the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis) by BBC Verify estimates the fire, which first began on 24 June, has burned 606 hectares (1,630 acres) – equivalent to 900 football pitches.

This is larger than the footprint of Hadfield, one of the nearest towns to the wildfire and home to about 6,700 people.

Lees – who has been monitoring the wildfire using satellite imagery – added: “In Wales we tend to have some large ones. In terms of being the largest fire that we’ve seen in the Peak District, it probably would need to grow another 25% or so to overtake the Saddleworth fire, and obviously Fylingdales was bigger again.”

A further wildfire at Dovestone Reservoir, north of the Tintwistle blaze, covers about 90 hectares (220 acres).

Lees added: “At the moment the fire services have been doing a fantastic job keeping it under control as much as possible. We probably won’t see this being completely out until we get some good rain.”

Clive Stanbrook, deputy chief fire officer for Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service, said on Thursday the operation was “complex and challenging”, which the brigade and partner agencies were working to bring to a “safe conclusion as quickly as possible”.

Firefighters said due to its vast scale, the ground affected had been divided into four sectors – Didsbury Sector, Crowden Sector, Arnfield Sector and Featherbed Moss Sector – to allow teams to focus resources on specific areas.

Stanbrook said: “Around 65 firefighters from Derbyshire and across the UK, supported by partner organisations including the Fire Operations Group, are actively supporting the response to the Tintwistle Moor wildfire, with many more being rotated and mobilised when required.

“Thanks to their hard work, and the support of many colleagues behind the scenes, significant progress has been made.”

But a huge issue for those on the ground – or in the skies, with helicopters providing support by dropping loads of water on to the wildfire – is what is actually burning.

Lees said: “In the summer, we tend to get different types of vegetation igniting – woody shrubs, things like heather, and they burn much more intensely, which means that the fires can be not only large, but also severe as well.

“Once the wildfire gets into the peat, peat is a fuel, burned historically particularly in Scotland and Ireland, so it does burn incredibly well.

“Once the fire gets into that, it is incredibly vulnerable. We’re struggling with ways to prevent the fire spreading once it gets into the peat and prevent it reigniting.”

Peak District National Park Authority ranger Kate Wilson, 40, from Buxton in the county, has been just one of those searching for hotspots in the peatland, and helping to keep the flames from spreading.

She said: “You’ve got your full firefighting kits, you’ve got all your tools, you’re carrying water and you’re trying to put out flaming moorland.

“It’s really hot, really hard work, you get really dirty, but also you feel like you’re doing good work and really helping the environment.

“You get competing emotions, you’re frustrated that the fires happen, really sad to see the devastation, there should be heather and shrubs and grass and bilberries, you can walk past a nest of eggs that have been completely burnt out.

“But there’s a real sense of camaraderie. We’re a very small cog in a massive firefighting machine, everyone is working really hard in hard conditions.”

The fire can be devastating for wildlife. The flames destroy nests, kill fledglings, mammals, and insects unable to escape the fast-moving flames.

Dr Kirsten Lees added: “It’s really upsetting to see the impact that it’s having on the vegetation, the plants and the wildlife.

“This is going to have a really, really devastating impact on the wildlife particularly our ground nesting birds so curlews, skylarks… things like that are really vulnerable to wildfires because they nest literally on the ground – they can’t escape the flames so their chicks, their eggs, particularly late spring, early summer, they’re really vulnerable.”

And once the fire is dampened down, the habitats needed to support fragile ecosystems are lost, sometimes for decades, Craig Best – National Trust general manager for the Peak District – said.

“These peatland habitats are vitally important for all of us,” he said.

“They provide our drinking water, they store carbon, they’re a great place for people to walk, and obviously they’re essential for nature, but these fires can have a huge impact on these landscapes and it’s particularly the peat soils we get concerned about.

“Every millimetre of peat takes approximately 100 years to accumulate.”

Wildfires come with a human impact too, above and beyond the obvious physical damage they cause to land and sometimes property.

All smoke is potentially harmful to your health, according to advice from the UK Health Security Agency.

Fine particles in the smoke, which can vary depending on what is being burned, can penetrate deep into your lungs and even enter your bloodstream causing illness.

While short-term exposure is not usually an issue for healthy people, people with health conditions are more likely to be affected.

Nicola Naylor, a farmer whose land sits near to Tintwistle, said: “The fire itself has been one of the most dramatic ones I’ve seen in the last 20 years, and the fire service’s response is amazing.

“People are shocked at how much smoke there’s been. People with health conditions, people that were older, children, were distressed by it.”

And Lees added: “When we do eventually get some rain, that run-off is going to go into our reservoirs and our water supply, and it’s going to cost more to treat that to make sure it’s clean for us.”

Rob Kenning, ranger team manager for the Peak District National Park Authority, said it was trialling using a seasonal ranger to patrol in the evenings to help prevent wildfires in the lighter, warmer summer months in areas likely to attract lots of tourists.

He said council public spaces protection orders have also begun to be enforced, which can see people starting fires or using barbecues fined up to £1,000 in parts of the Peak District.

He said: “Unfortunately, having many more visitors coming out to the park, we’re pretty clear that this is going to be an ongoing problem and potentially an increasing problem.”

And it’s not just the Peak District that is seeing a rise in wildfires.

The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) said more than 40,000 hectares burned last year in more than 1,000 incidents, while in 2026 fire and rescue services in England and Wales have responded to 342 wildfires up to 6 July, according to data from the National Fire Chiefs Council.

The FBU is urging government to convene a National Wildfire Summit to build national resilience, and is calling for 5,000 firefighters to be recruited nationwide.

Work is also being carried out to build resilience into the Peak District landscape itself.

Lees said: “We’ve got ongoing projects looking at peatland restoration, raising the water levels, things like that.

“But peat stores a huge amount of carbon built up over hundreds, thousands of years and this gets burnt off in a matter of days, which then contributes to climate change which makes the wildfires worse and it becomes a vicious cycle.

“It used to be the case that I would talk about my work with wildfires in the UK and people would be surprised that we even had wildfires at all. And now it seems like we’re seeing them every summer.”

Additional reporting by Matt Weigold, Alex Thorp, Steve Beech and Dan Hunt

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