Flow Country
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How it came to be
The Flow Country is a landscape of blanket bog spread across Caithness and Sutherland in northern Scotland. Its peat has been building up for about 9,000 years and is still growing. 'Flow' is a Scots word for a bog, possibly derived from Old Norse. The peat holds roughly 400 million tonnes of carbon, more than all the forests and woodlands of the United Kingdom combined.
In the 1980s, supported by forestry grants and tax breaks, large areas of bog were drained and planted with conifers in the space of a few years. By the time planting stopped, an estimated 900 pairs of golden plover, almost 800 pairs of dunlin and 130 pairs of greenshank had been lost. In January 1988 Malcolm Rifkind announced that half of the peatlands would be protected as Sites of Special Scientific Interest, and that year the Chancellor Nigel Lawson ended the tax breaks.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds bought the Forsinard estate in 1994 and began felling plantations so that the land could return to bog. In July 2024 the World Heritage Committee, meeting in New Delhi, inscribed the Flow Country as the world's first peatland World Heritage site.
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