Arran seabed restoration championed by Sir David Attenborough
Don MacNeish and Howard Wood have almost a century of recreational diving experience between them so when they saw the seabed off the Isle of Arran being destroyed they took action.The pair spent years convincing the Scottish government to create Scotland's first "no take zone" in Lamlash Bay which halted all forms of fishing.As world leaders gather in the south of France for the UN Oceans Conference, their story is being showcased as a prime example of how the seas can be protected.Don has featured in the latest David Attenborough film, Ocean, which was released to coincide with the summit.
The destruction the pair witnessed was being caused by bottom trawling and dredging which involves dragging heavy equipment or nets along the seabed to scoop up the catch.The "no take zone" - introduced in 2008 - banned all forms of fishing within an area of one square mile.Seventeen years on and the zone, along with the Marine Protected Area (MPA) surrounding it, has naturally restored to create a nursery ground for young fish and marine life.Lobster populations have quadrupled while the number of king scallops has increased six fold.But it could take two centuries for it to become the complex, balanced ecosystem it once was.
A focus of the UN Oceans Conference is expected to be the environmental damage caused by bottom trawling and dredging."Because we were part of the first divers that went down to the sea bed round about Arran, we started to see the damage that was being caused and realised that unless we can bring up these images, people wouldn't understand," Don said.Howard added: "There was the odd star fish left but basically the whole sea bed was just raked away."The pair said they originally gathered together local fishermen in a pub and asked them which area of the sea would inconvenience them the least if it were to be closed off.They pointed to Lamlash Bay between Arran and Holy Isle.There followed a years' long battle with politicians and civil servants before the protected area was finally created.A Marine Protected Area was later added, covering the waters around south Arran which restricted some, but not all, forms of fishing.
Don, who is 78, has an engineering background and first began diving in the early 1980s while Howard, a 70-year-old horticulturalist, first dived in 1974.In the film Ocean with David Attenborough, Don delivers powerful testimony of how he had witnessed alarming changes to the seabed since the three-mile limit was scrapped in 1984.The limit banned inshore dredging and trawling and many creel fishermen would like to see it return.Creel fishing involves baited traps being left on the seabed which are usually collected a few days later.It is considered to be a "low impact" method compared with bottom trawling and dredging.The Scottish Fishermen's Federation has said these methods are only damaging if they are carried out "in the wrong place" and that Scotland's waters are already heavily managed.It added that dredging and trawling were "really efficient methods of producing food" and that the right balance needed to be struck between food production and protection of the seas.But conservationists have long argued that many MPAs do not offer any protection at all against damaging fishing.
Don says David Attenborough's film is "absolutely crucial" in highlighting the damage caused to the seabed by some forms of fishing.He wants people to start taking personal responsibility for what they eat and says small pockets of nature need to be allowed to reproduce to seed wider areas. Howard added that there needed to be "proper" protection of the seas - banning damaging fishing methods.The men are backing a call from the Our Seas coalition to ban bottom trawling and dredging in 30% of Scotland's inshore water.Although the pair don't dive as much as they used to, both revisited the "no take zone" together a couple of years ago to see what progress was being made.Don said: "I just couldn't believe the regeneration that had happened and I was just swimming along with a demand valve in my mouth and a huge smile on my face. This is what it was all about."I'm all for fishing, but not necessarily everywhere. We just need small pockets of protection to be able to reseed the entire area."
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The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘It takes 25 years for a footprint to disappear' – the secret, beguiling magic of Britain's bogs
I haven't found an hour when I don't love a bog. Recently, after a night of counting rare caterpillars in Borth in Mid Wales (they come out only after dark), walking back to the car under the glow of a flower moon, I wondered if 2am was my new favourite. I felt very safe, held by the bog's softness, and everyone that was out at that hour seemed to have a sense of humour. I met a nightjar hopping around on the ground, pretending, I think, to be a frog. But there is also something about the humidity of a languid afternoon on a bog, when everything slows and fat bumbles hum, that is surprisingly good. I have done freezing horizontal rain and thick, cold-to-your-bones fog and wind so howling that I couldn't think. All of those were hard, but I did come away feeling truly alive. I have travelled to the tip of Scotland and far beyond to visit bogs. In all the hours, days and weeks I have spent on them, I have learned that time behaves differently. It stretches out like the bog landscape, seeming to still the world beyond. There is something very special about that. Like many of us, I came to know bogs not by visiting one, but by ripping open a bag of compost and plunging my hands into the soft, dark peat. Then I learned that there was more to peat than an amiable bed in which to coax a plant to grow. It is ripped from a living, breathing entity with complex ways and wants. We sneer at bogs, we tease them and drain them, scrape at them and pillage them, but give them back their waters and they care not just for the creatures that live on them, but those much further afield. There is more carbon stored in peatlands than in all the above-ground vegetation in the world. They account for 3% of landmass, but hold at least 30% of soil carbon. Seventy per cent of the UK's drinking water starts its journey on peatlands, where the bogs not only filter but also slow water, helping to mitigate flooding. This is why draining, extracting and turning peat into agricultural land has consequences. Roughly 80% of the UK's peatlands are damaged, polluting our water, exacerbating flooding and increasing the risk of fires. But this knowledge doesn't stop us using extracted peat. Sure, I don't buy peat compost, but I have eaten fresh cultivated mushrooms (most large-scale growing is done in peat), bought supermarket basil (usually peat-grown), 'saved' numerous discounted houseplants (only about 11% of houseplants are truly grown peat-free) and eaten lettuce, celery, potatoes, carrots, peas, beans and tomatoes, some of which are grown in the UK on drained peat, as well as crisps, biscuits, cakes and chips made with palm oil grown on drained peatlands in south-east Asia. Most of us are complicit in damaging, extracting and wasting peat, despite years of writing, campaigning, shouting and imploring. I decided I would get to know the bogs, to learn their ways and stories and see if a different song might stir the soul. Bogs are magical in many ways. These ancient beings are much more than their brown flatness suggests from a distance. Below the surface, they seduce water with their engineering. Under every bog is a sea held in suspension, so when you walk over a bog you are truly walking on water. It is why they wobble when you jump up and down on them. They are nature's answer to a water bed. Don't jump, though – they are fragile places. It takes an average of 25 years for a footprint to disappear. What is a bog? Well, there are many types of peatlands, but broadly speaking peat is either fen or – more frequently – bog. A fen is alkali: it gets its water from a ground or surface source and is flushed with minerals because of it. A bog is acid: it is fed entirely by the sky, which means it is very poor in nutrients. Bogs form in wet places, where the humidity and rainfall are high and evapotranspiration (the combined process where water moves from land to air) is low. Many of them start life as a depression, a hollow or a dip in the land that starts to fill with water. The rock below is hard, often impervious, such as granite, and the water pools. As the climate and world around it change, things begin to grow around the bog: plants spring up, die, fall in the water. The dip starts to fill with rotting organic matter, creating oxygen-poor, acidic conditions. Most things don't want to grow in waters that are turning acidic, but mosses don't mind; in fact, they thrive. This is particularly true of bog mosses, which are from the genus Sphagnum. The mosses creep in, the rain continues to fall and the bog is born, made up of plants, mostly mosses, some rushes and a few shrubs, living and dying, but not completely rotting. This is what peat is: partially decomposed organic matter. When it is wet, it is happy; when it is drained of water, it starts rotting again. A similar process happens with fens. But whereas peat is extracted from bogs to be used for compost, most of our lowland fens have been drained for agriculture. That flush of minerals from the groundwater makes them fertile places, once drained. Peat in the northern hemisphere is mostly made up of mosses. They call the shots; they are the ecosystem engineers. These tiny, centimetre-high plants are alchemists, taking only what falls from the sky and creating a kind of immortality for themselves as they strive to be dead and alive at the same time. They do this by pickling themselves and everything that falls into the bog in acid, which means nothing entirely rots away. The bog mosses' pickle juice also prevents bigger plants from doing too well and shading out the moss. The mosses do this in such style, too. They don't stick to the run-of-the-mill green – they come in every jewel tone imaginable: golds and oranges, neon-green emeralds, lobster pinks and deep wine reds, in russets and chestnut browns, their colours turning with the seasons, deepening across the summer. What appears flat from a distance up close rises and falls in miniature mountains of hummock-type mosses, with valleys, pools and lawns of looser types. The things that live on and in this world have run with this otherworldly theme. There are the giants: bog bush-crickets with their huge antennae; emperor moths with their peacock-like eyespots on their wings; darters, damselflies and dragonflies of all colours that often come to peer at you curiously if you sit for a while. This is to say nothing of the green-eyed horseflies, which are a terrifying size, although it is hard to not be beguiled by their giant emerald eyes. There are frogs, toads, lizards, snakes and so many spiders, including one of Britain's largest, the raft spider. Spend long enough at a bog pool and you might spot one floating, waiting for the vibrations of prey, only to run across the surface of the water and pounce. They go for prey as large as tadpoles, but if you frighten them, they dive and swim underwater. Imagine that – a swimming spider! These are just the easy-to-spot guys. There is an abundance of tiny insects: pseudoscorpions, gnats, midges (not all of which bite), strange-looking larvae and tiny micromoths that flit about. These bring an abundance of other wings. Peatlands are hugely important habitats for birds: hen harriers, golden and white-tipped eagles, merlins, owls, jack snipes, golden plovers, curlews, lapwings, pipits, snow buntings, grouse, dunlins, redshanks and, at coastal edges, strange-looking ducks. A chorus of beings in full song for those intrepid enough to venture in. For that is the thing about bogs: they are not hugely interested in wowing you. The mountains have good views and the forest has majesty; the sand dunes sculpture and the wildflower meadow an easy romance. But the bog is quite happy to be passed over – it will share its best secrets only with those who carefully tiptoe in and are patient enough to wait a while to see what comes out once they have settled down. The bog has other secrets, too: underneath this living layer, preserved in all that peat, is an archive of our past doings. A healthy bog grows just a millimetre a year, which puts in context anyone who tries to argue that cutting peat is sustainable. It is important to remember that less than 13% of our bogs are considered healthy, or in a near-natural state. But each millimetre is a record of everything that happened that year: it holds big data, such as fragments of moth wings or pollen and seeds, and tiny microbe data, such as all the amoeba that dined on the semi-rotting plant material before it got weighed down by water. This allows scientists to take a core sample and tell you what the climate was like 6,000 years ago, which plants grew there, which moths fluttered and which bees buzzed, who crawled over and passed by. There are other buried treasures. The most famous are the bog bodies, including Denmark's iron-age Tollund Man and Ireland's bronze-age Cashel Man, but you can also find hoards of coins, jewellery and weapons, as well as pots and pans, fishing nets, whole canoes, carts and cartwheels and even butter. When our ancestors buried all this, they knew it wouldn't disappear or rot away. It is believed that this is why so much of it is decommissioned, broken and bent, just in case the bog was a portal to another world and the undead might be able to use it when they rose again. Ritually buried bog butter is often found near bog bodies. It represents such a huge amount of milk to a culture only just beginning to farm that if it wasn't a gift to the gods, perhaps it was a gift to the bog itself. The bog certainly represented seasonal abundance for those who knew where to look. It was a source of plant medicines, dyes and fibres. Then there is the rich foraging opportunity: cranberries, bilberries and cowberries, as well as all the meat and eggs from otters, fish and fowl. Not an easy place to get on or off, but useful nevertheless. The reverence our ancestors felt for bogs is a lesson we need to remember. They aren't barren or desolate, although many are certainly remote. They shouldn't be drained or burned to make them productive, nor should they be extracted from. What they need is our respect, because peatlands are the air-conditioning units of the world. Their long-term storage of carbon and filtering of water is helping to keep our climate cool. And no one needs the air-con turned off now. Cors y Llyn near Builth Wells in Powys is a great example of a quaking bog, with strange, stunted ancient Scots pines growing on it. This perfect little bog is surrounded by wonderful orchid meadows (above) and you can nearly always find wild cranberries creeping over the mosses. There is an accessible boardwalk. The Flow Country of Caithness and Sutherland is a Unesco world heritage site and perhaps the crown jewel of the UK's peatlands. The biggest blanket bog complex in Europe, it is rich not just in bird life, but also in neolithic structures. Start at the RSPB Forsinard Flows reserve. Swarth Moor is a raised mire next to the village of Helwith Bridge in Ribblesdale. It is home to three nationally scarce species of dragonfly – black darter, common hawker and emerald damselfly. There is well-surfaced bridleway around the southern edge, leading to a viewing platform that gives you a peatland vista without you getting bogged down. The South Pennines is good peat country, with moors galore. Highlights include the moorlands around Gunnerside village, Haworth Moor (above, of Wuthering Heights fame) and Tarn Moss, a raised bog owned by the National Trust. Marches Mosses, a group of lowland raised bogs on the border of Wales and Shropshire, are not without the scars of human intervention – peat cutting, drainage for agriculture, forestry – but still there is a wealth of peatland wildlife, particularly damselflies and dragonflies. There are trails around Bettisfield Moss, Wem Moss and Fenn's and Whixall mosses. Dartmoor in Devon is a vast upland area of peat; much of it is damaged and dominated by purple moor grass, but restoration work is changing this. The visitors centre at Postbridge has Tor Royal Bog, the only raised bog in Devon and Cornwall, while the nearby Fox Tor Mire is a good example of a valley blanket bog. Peatlands by Alys Fowler is out now (Hodder Press, £20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Daily Mail
Inside Richard Hughes' first year at Liverpool: Anfield chief arrived with daunting to-do list... but here's how club's 'stubborn' mastermind wooed Slot, kept hold of Salah and Van Dijk and squeezed £10m out of Real Madrid for Alexander-Arnold
There was a knock at the door and Arne Slot opened it. The man standing behind it was a suited-and-booted Glasweigan chap and he walked in, chunky ring-binder under arm ready for his host to stick the kettle on or pour a bottle of red, looking like a teacher about to give a lesson.
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
She flew hazardous fighter planes for Britain during WW2. She just turned 106
Nancy Miller Stratford sat alone behind the controls of a Spitfire fighter plane, charting an uncertain course through an impenetrable clot of dark clouds. On the horizon, the young pilot could see a promising patch of daylight, 'like the devil waving his hand to come on through'. But just as suddenly as the sky opened up, the clouds closed in again. Her visibility plummeted to zero. She had no idea which way was up and which was down. Far beneath her lay the moody Scottish coastline, where an unplanned landing would be next to impossible. Fortunately, it was life-or-death scenarios like these when Stratford was the sharpest. In that moment, she felt no fear – this was simply a problem that needed to be solved. Despite having no formal instrument training, she relied solely on the control panel in the cockpit, rather than the view outside her window, to muscle the plane through the wall of clouds and land safely at the nearest airport. The year was 1944. Stratford was 25 years old. Last week, Stratford celebrated her 106th birthday at home in California. After eight decades, she and a small group of other female pilots are finally earning more widespread recognition for the critical – and dangerous – roles they played in the second world war. A new book called Spitfires, written by the journalist and author Becky Aikman, chronicles the pilots' vivid wartime stories as the first American women to fly military aircraft. At the time, women like Stratford were banned from serving in combat roles for the US. So they joined the Air Transport Auxiliary instead: a British civilian group that ferried barely tested bombers and fighter planes to airbases, and then returned damaged wrecks for repair. Because the women often had to contend with shoddy equipment and bad weather, the job was hazardous and unpredictable; one in seven transport pilots died in crashes over the course of the war. But the role also came with an unprecedented sense of freedom and global importance for female pilots; Stratford once even delivered a Spitfire to a Polish squadron only a few days before they fought in D-Day. Today, Stratford is the last surviving pilot of the heroic transport group. Her condo in a picturesque retirement community in Carlsbad, a city on the Pacific coast near San Diego, is filled with mementoes from the war and her long flying career: miniature model airplanes (she has flown 103 different types of aircraft), black-and-photo photos of her in uniform, and even a prized leather flying helmet (used as protection against the elements and deafening engine noise in the early days of aviation). And last Thursday, that small condo was packed with dozens of other retirees and staff who had come to wish her happy birthday. At 106, and with such a formidable background, Stratford has become a quasi-celebrity within the retirement community. Friends and family brought her cupcakes and champagne, and a local pet therapy group ushered in a parade of dogs for Stratford to pet. Though she lost her hearing many decades ago from the constant roar of plane engines, visitors wrote down their birthday messages to her on a whiteboard. To mark the occasion, Stratford wore her best pair of dog-themed pyjamas. The fact that the former pilot has lived longer than most people she knew in her early life is something of a mystery, even to her. 'I'm kind of surprised,' she said, before adding: 'But then I am old.' For Stratford, the secret to longevity depends on the day. Sometimes, her answer to that question is 'not drinking too much'. But in a cheekier moment, she told a friend recently: the real key is 'chocolate and vodka tonics'. Stratford and the other female aviators she flew with during the war – a diverse group nicknamed the 'Attagirls' – now have a defined place in history books. But in the 1940s, Stratford wasn't thinking about any broader, lofty ideals about the advancement of women in aviation. 'I just wanted to fly,' she said frankly, reminiscing one sunny afternoon before her birthday. From a comfortable chair in the living room, she had the best view of her model airplanes that sat atop the TV like a crown. 'In other words,' she said, 'it wasn't exactly the thing to do then, so therefore you have to be pretty positive about what you wanted to do.' Stratford was born in Los Angeles in 1919, just after the end of the first world war. At 16 years old, she rode in a plane for the first time as a birthday present. That first flight, she wrote in a self-published memoir in 2010, was fairly boring – until the pilot struggled with the landing. Feeling the plane's sudden steep descent, Stratford let out 'a whoop of joy', while her brother froze in terror next to her. Stratford later chased that feeling as a member of the Air Transport Auxiliary. A few years after her first plane ride, she happened to read about civilian pilot training while she was in college. Her father wasn't happy about it, but he signed a release form for her to take lessons. Later, when Stratford was ready to join the transport unit, her then-fiance forbade her from going. She ended the relationship and went anyway. Though Stratford had a bit more freedom to fly in the UK, female pilots back in the US dealt not only with discrimination, but intentional sabotage that resulted in death. Male pilots would sometimes stuff rags or sugar in the gas tank of a woman's plane to make them crash, or even slash their tires, as Aikman reported in Spitfires. At least one pilot died after someone added sugar to her plane's gas tank. Even after Stratford's time serving in the war, Aikman wrote, 'the aviation industry did not open the gates for her' when she returned home. So she took one of the only jobs she could get: flying crop-dusting planes in Oregon. But eventually, Stratford broke barriers again, becoming the second woman in the United States to earn her commercial helicopter license. She got married and moved with her husband to Alaska, where they ran a helicopter business together, transporting adventurers to high peaks and construction workers to the Trans-Alaska pipeline. Between then and now, Stratford said it was remarkable to see how far women have come in aviation – although the world has been slow to accept their successes. In the US, major commercial airlines didn't start hiring female pilots until the 1970s, and women were banned from flying in combat roles until the early 1990s: roughly 50 years after Stratford played her part in the second world war. 'Women proved that they could do things, and so the men had to let them in,' Stratford said. 'I think women have proved themselves in aviation, and they're flying airlines and everything now.' Still, in 2025, women continue to face major obstacles. While the number of women earning their pilot licenses has increased dramatically in recent years, women make up only about 5% of pilots flying with airlines in the UK and the US. Stratford's advice to female aviators today is simple: 'Keep at it, keep at it, keep at it.' All told, flying has remained one of the most important parts of her life. As she wrote in her memoir: 'I loved all the flying, the freedom, doing what I liked to do. It was wild and woolly at times. I was a lucky person in my career. I smile. I have absolutely no regrets.' A decade later, her thoughts on the subject haven't changed. 'I was glad that I could help out,' she said matter-of-factly. 'I think my mother thought I should get married or something, but I didn't feel that way.'
