IT’S a drizzly weekday afternoon on Swarth Moor, near Stainforth, and Alex Smith is standing in the middle of a bog, water lapping dangerously close to the tops of her wellies.

“A year ago I was working in a factory, listening to podcasts about soil to pass the time. Now look at me,” she grins. “I’m working in one of the England’s most important landscapes.”

Alex has spent the last ten months as a trainee at the Yorkshire Peat Partnership (YPP), a role made possible by Groundwork’s New to Nature scheme and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund which is designed for people who might not normally have access to a career in the environmental sector.

“I didn’t go to university after college and after a few different jobs I ended up working in a factory making bicycle wheels,” the 26-year-old says. “I loved the people and the company I worked for, but I found the work itself repetitive.”

Knowing she wanted some of her work to be outdoors among nature Alex began looking for trainee roles but was put off because of the sector normally requires a lot of working for free to gain experience. Then the paid apprenticeship at YPP came up.

“I’m not in a privileged position when I can just work for free all the time, I have bills to pay,” she says. “New to Nature removed those barriers for me.”

Often dismissed as muddy wastelands, blanket bogs are vital to our ecosystem. Their waterlogged conditions mean plants and moss never fully break down and instead form layers of peat which locks carbon below ground, while on the surface the mosses slow the flow of rainwater to the river systems.

“Sphagnum moss is my absolute favourite that grows on blanket bogs,” Alex says. “I love it so much I now do the #sphagnummonday posts on our Instagram account. It absorbs 20 times its own weight in water and releases it extremely slowly. If you pick up a clump of sphagnum and squeeze it, it’s like a sponge.”

North Yorkshire is home more than a quarter of England’s blanket bogs, with 92,946 hectares. Yet the majority is badly degraded after a post-war agricultural policy incentivised landowners and managers to drain the peatlands to make it more “productive”, normally through sheep grazing.

An estimated 16 million tonnes of CO2 are released from damaged UK peatlands each year – more than the annual emissions of Drax power station – but a healthy peatland should store CO2. This release of carbon contributes to climate change.

Since 2009 YPP has been the umbrella organisation, led by Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, working to restore those landscapes, so they once again store water and carbon, and provide vital habitats for wildlife such as dragonflies and newts.

YPP have brought 42,868 ha of blanket bog into their restoration management plan, planting 1.3 million sphagnum plugs, 800,000 cottongrass plugs and revegetating 209 ha of bare peat.

Restoring blanket bogs is a long-term undertaking, but Alex says that monitoring the work done by her colleagues has made her feel positive about the future.

“Complete restoration takes decades, but you can see signs of it working quite quickly. A few weeks ago we went out onto Fleet Moss, which is one of our flagship sites, to get some before and after photos and the change in just five years was impressive. It makes me feel proud and hopeful when you see something tangible like that. More people need to know about the significance of this work.”

The remote nature of most blanket bogs makes demonstrating their importance to the public difficult. Alongside monitoring progress and helping with restoration, one aspect of Alex’s role is to support their community engagement team.

“We can’t get significant numbers of people up onto the peatlands, so we need to bring the peatlands to them,” she says. “One experiment we do is to get children to build a town out of blocks at the bottom of a ramp. We then release water down the ramp so they can see how devastating flooding can be.

“After the town has been rebuilt, we put layers of moss down the ramp and release the same amount of water – the results are incredible, I love watching the kids’ faces when they realise the power nature has to protect us.”

April marks the end of Alex’s year-long traineeship and she has already accepted a role as project assistant at YPP, so she can continue to work on blanket bogs. “I’m just taking in everything my colleagues tell me and listening to podcasts about soil,” she says. “Bog life is a great life.”

New to Nature is run by Groundwork and has been funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. More information is available on the Groundwork website at https://www.groundwork.org.uk/

More information about the Yorkshire Peat Partnership is available at: https://www.yppartnership.org.uk/