Morag Angus is a Manager at the South West Peatland Partnership (SWPP), working on peatland restoration across Dartmoor.

The SWPP is a collaboration of landowners, farmers, local councils, national park teams and environmental bodies working across Dartmoor, Exmoor and Cornwall to restore peatlands at scale. Each year they work with contractors to deliver thousands of individual restoration interventions, bunds, log dams, timber blocks, wool trials and hydrology repair work. This is all designed to return water to the moors and bring damaged peatlands back to life.

The Duchy is one of our partnerships funding the restoration work, along with Natural England's Nature for Climate Peatland restoration grant, Southwest Water, the Environment Agency and the National Trust.

We spoke with Morag about her role and why peatlands are such vital habitats.

Peatland is a made from layers of partially decomposed vegetation that build up under waterlogged conditions. It’s one of the UK’s most important carbon stores, but over 80% of the UK’s peatland is degraded, meaning that it instead releases carbon and loses its ability to support wildlife or regulate water. Restoring peatland involves re wetting the peat in the landscape, blocking erosion channels and allowing bog plants like sphagnum moss to return. This enables them to store more carbon, regulate water flow, reduce downstream flood risk, improve drought resilience and provide habitat for rare plants, insects and birds.

Across the country we work with tenant farmers and commoners that manage the land, and on Duchy land, and we've been trialling different things with them. We’ve seen wetter bogs holding more water year-round, improved water quality, reduced erosion, and habitats recovering for wildlife.

Over the last 15 years I’ve been working on Dartmoor, it's been amazing to see it going from this degraded landscape, to one where we do the work, we do the restoration and then you see the biodiversity coming in. For example, you see the dragonflies and all of the wildlife coming back in, the birds, it's just amazing. The peatland is coming alive again.

The Duchy’s role goes far beyond funding. They take a hands-on, long-term approach, engaging closely with farmers, ecologists and contractors. Their commitment to integrated land management, climate resilience and community benefit strengthens the partnership and helps create landscapes where habitats and local people can thrive together.

Farmers often tell us they see wetter ground holding up better in dry periods, with improved grazing conditions. They appreciate that the work benefits water availability for livestock and reduces erosion risk, taking pride in trialling new techniques that support both nature recovery and viable farming.

Partnerships like this one help turn opportunities into reality. There’s huge potential to scale up restoration across Dartmoor, Exmoor and Cornwall as climate pressures intensify. With stronger partnerships, more data and continued investment, we can restore hundreds more hectares each year, creating nature-rich, climate-resilient landscapes that benefit wildlife, water, farming and communities.

I would inspire them to come out with us, we can show them a degraded peatland and then have a look at a site where we've done work, so they can really see that transformation. If you were to visit a site we’d done work on about 10 years ago, you can see the change in vegetation, how all those important species have come in and all the wildlife that's now there. It’s just such a lovely thing.

Success is healthier, functioning peatlands that store carbon, support wildlife and safeguard our water. But it’s also about people, creating deeper community engagement, farmers feeling supported, communities benefiting from cleaner water and reduced flood risk. That the landscapes are cared for in a way that strengthens both the environment and the livelihoods connected to it. For me personally, it's enabling me to do something locally and really positive for the environment, this partnership gives me hope for future generations.