Northern Scotland’s Flow Country becomes world heritage site

The world heritage agency Unesco has confirmed that the Flow Country, the planet’s largest blanket bog, which covers the far north of Scotland, has been made a world heritage site.

The Flow Country, which covers about 1,500 sq miles of Caithness and Sutherland, is one of the world’s largest carbon stores and the first peatland to be designated by Unesco, after a 40-year campaign by environmentalists.

Home to some of the deepest and best-preserved peatlands, it joins sites such as the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and the Grand Canyon in the US among the world’s most protected and treasured natural assets.

With peat as deep as 30 metres in places, ecologists had told Unesco the Flow Country is the best example on the planet of a crucial yet threatened ecosystem; it hosts a diverse range of specialist plants and wildlife that have evolved to live on blanket bogs and peatland.

Its peat layers also store millions of tonnes of carbon, and Unesco agreed that its preservation had even greater significance because of the climate crisis. Its conservation would be a model for peatland protection globally.

Graham Neville, who led the campaign to designate the site on behalf of NatureScot, the government conservation agency, said the decision was “momentous”.

“World heritage site status will lead to greater understanding of the Flow Country and raise the profile of Scotland’s peatlands globally for their value as biodiverse habitats and important carbon sinks,” he said.

“It is a wonderful recognition of the expert stewardship of farmers and crofters in maintaining this incredible ecosystem as a natural legacy for future generations.”

The UK already has a number of globally renowned world heritage sites, including the archipelago of St Kilda in the Atlantic, Stonehenge, the Tower of London, Georgian Bath and the old and new towns of Edinburgh.

Also on Friday, Unesco announced that a small 18th-century settlement in Antrim in Northern Ireland would join them.

The Moravian Church village was founded in 1759 by the Moravians, one of the oldest Protestant denominations in Christianity, dating back to the 15th century and preceding Martin Luther’s Reformation.

It is linked to other Moravian sites that already have Unesco world heritage status including settlements in Hurrnhut, Germany and Bethlehem in the US.

The Flow Country’s designation, which follows exhaustive scientific surveys, was heavily recommended by specialists with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) before this month’s Unesco meeting in India.

The IUCN said it was “the most extensive and diverse example of an actively accumulating blanket bog landscape found globally. Distinctive forms of blanket bog have evolved, exhibiting a diverse mosaic of mire and vegetation types with their associated species assemblages, including the full range of habitats from pools to drier hummock microsites including elements of damaged bog, transitional bog, and fen communities.”

Congratulating the campaigners who had been seeking recognition for years, the UK culture minister Chris Bryant said Gracehill was “a town built around the central values of equality and tolerance and I am glad to see it gain the recognition that it deserves”.

While much of Northern Ireland’s Protestant heritage is linked to Scotland, the Moravian village is one of the exceptions built by German-speaking Protestants on the back of a £2,000 loan from the wider religious community elsewhere in Europe.

The perfectly preserved village and green consists of small cottages, each with enough land to grow potatoes and keep a farm animal, a school, a church with two larger houses for unmarried members of the community.