The Flow Country () is a vast area of

bog A bog or bogland is a wetland that accumulates peat as a deposit of dead plant materials often mosses, typically sphagnum moss. It is one of the four main types of wetlands. Other names for bogs include mire, mosses, quagmire, and musk ...

peat Peat is an accumulation of partially Decomposition, decayed vegetation or organic matter. It is unique to natural areas called peatlands, bogs, mires, Moorland, moors, or muskegs. ''Sphagnum'' moss, also called peat moss, is one of the most ...

land in

Caithness Caithness (; ; ) is a Shires of Scotland, historic county, registration county and Lieutenancy areas of Scotland, lieutenancy area of Scotland. There are two towns, being Wick, Caithness, Wick, which was the county town, and Thurso. The count ...

and

Sutherland Sutherland () is a Counties of Scotland, historic county, registration county and lieutenancy areas of Scotland, lieutenancy area in the Scottish Highlands, Highlands of Scotland. The name dates from the Scandinavian Scotland, Viking era when t ...

, northern

Scotland Scotland is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It contains nearly one-third of the United Kingdom's land area, consisting of the northern part of the island of Great Britain and more than 790 adjac ...

. It is the largest

blanket bog Blanket bog or blanket mire, also known as featherbed bog, is an area of peatland, forming where there is a climate of high rainfall and a low level of evapotranspiration, allowing peat to develop not only in wet hollows but over large expanses ...

in Europe, and covers about . It is an area of deep

, dotted with bog pools, and is a very important habitat for wildlife. As peat is largely made up of the remains of plants, which are themselves made up of

carbon Carbon () is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol C and atomic number 6. It is nonmetallic and tetravalence, tetravalent—meaning that its atoms are able to form up to four covalent bonds due to its valence shell exhibiting 4 ...

, it locks up large stores of carbon for thousands of years. This carbon would otherwise be released to the atmosphere and contribute to

global warming Present-day climate change includes both global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its wider effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes ...

. In 2024 the Flow Country was awarded

World Heritage World Heritage Sites are landmarks and areas with legal protection under an treaty, international treaty administered by UNESCO for having cultural, historical, or scientific significance. The sites are judged to contain "cultural and natural ...

status by

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) with the aim of promoting world peace and International secur ...

on account of its unparalleled blanket bog habitat. It includes the Forsinard Flows National Nature Reserve and the Caithness and Sutherland Peatlands.

Wildlife

The Flow Country is home to a rich variety of wildlife, and is used as a breeding ground for many different species of birds, including greenshank,

dunlin The dunlin (''Calidris alpina'') is a small wader in the genus '' Calidris''. The English name is a dialect form of "dunling", first recorded in 1531–1532. It derives from ''dun'', "dull brown", with the suffix ''-ling'', meaning a person or ...

merlin The Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN) is an interferometer array of radio telescopes spread across England. The array is run from Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire by the University of Manchester on behalf of UK Re ...

and golden plover. Birds of prey found in the Flow Country include the buzzard and

hen harrier The hen harrier (''Circus cyaneus'') is a bird of prey. It breeds in Palearctic, Eurasia. The term "hen harrier" refers to its former habit of preying on free-ranging fowl. It bird migration, migrates to more southerly areas in winter. Eurasian ...

. One of the most prevalent plant species of the Flow Country is

sphagnum moss ''Sphagnum'' is a genus of approximately 380 accepted species of mosses, commonly known as sphagnum moss, also bog moss and quacker moss (although that term is also sometimes used for peat). Accumulations of ''Sphagnum'' can store water, since ...

, which can store large amounts of water, and eventually form

– the building block of a blanket bog. Carnivorous plants such as roundleaved sundew, greater sundew, and butterwort feed on the multitude of insects that inhabit the Flow Country. Large mammals such as

red deer The red deer (''Cervus elaphus'') is one of the largest deer species. A male red deer is called a stag or Hart (deer), hart, and a female is called a doe or hind. The red deer inhabits most of Europe, the Caucasus Mountains region, Anatolia, Ir ...

, and the less common roe deer, roam the Flow Country all year round and can be heard roaring during the autumn rutting season.

Geology

The principal geological deposit within the area is of course peat but other

Quaternary The Quaternary ( ) is the current and most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), as well as the current and most recent of the twelve periods of the ...

superficial deposits are recorded, principally those associated with the ice age such as

till image:Geschiebemergel.JPG, Closeup of glacial till. Note that the larger grains (pebbles and gravel) in the till are completely surrounded by the matrix of finer material (silt and sand), and this characteristic, known as ''matrix support'', is d ...

but also post-glacial

alluvium Alluvium (, ) is loose clay, silt, sand, or gravel that has been deposited by running water in a stream bed, on a floodplain, in an alluvial fan or beach, or in similar settings. Alluvium is also sometimes called alluvial deposit. Alluvium is ...

. All of these overlie bedrock which originates during four distinct intervals of geological time; the Archaean to Palaeoproterozoic

Lewisian gneiss The Lewisian complex or Lewisian gneiss is a suite of Precambrian metamorphic rocks that outcrop in the northwestern part of Scotland, forming part of the Hebridean terrane and the North Atlantic Craton. These rocks are of Archaean and Paleopr ...

, the

Neoproterozoic The Neoproterozoic Era is the last of the three geologic eras of the Proterozoic geologic eon, eon, spanning from 1 billion to 538.8 million years ago, and is the last era of the Precambrian "supereon". It is preceded by the Mesoproterozoic era an ...

Moine succession into which

Ordovician The Ordovician ( ) is a geologic period and System (geology), system, the second of six periods of the Paleozoic Era (geology), Era, and the second of twelve periods of the Phanerozoic Eon (geology), Eon. The Ordovician spans 41.6 million years f ...

Silurian The Silurian ( ) is a geologic period and system spanning 23.5 million years from the end of the Ordovician Period, at million years ago ( Mya), to the beginning of the Devonian Period, Mya. The Silurian is the third and shortest period of t ...

granite Granite ( ) is a coarse-grained (phanerite, phaneritic) intrusive rock, intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly coo ...

is intruded and the largely

Devonian The Devonian ( ) is a period (geology), geologic period and system (stratigraphy), system of the Paleozoic era (geology), era during the Phanerozoic eon (geology), eon, spanning 60.3 million years from the end of the preceding Silurian per ...

age

Old Red Sandstone Old Red Sandstone, abbreviated ORS, is an assemblage of rocks in the North Atlantic region largely of Devonian age. It extends in the east across Great Britain, Ireland and Norway, and in the west along the eastern seaboard of North America. It ...

History

"Flow" is a Scots word for a bog or morass, possibly derived from

Old Norse Old Norse, also referred to as Old Nordic or Old Scandinavian, was a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants ...

(compare the Icelandic word ''flói'', which has the same meaning). The bogs of the Flow Country have been subject to human activity since the end of the last ice age. In the last 200 years, they have been affected by human activity, including sheep grazing and forestry. In the 1970s and 1980s, government tax breaks incentivised commercial forestry operations which drained areas of the bogs and planted non-native conifers, damaging the bogs and causing loss of some of the peatland. In 1987 the

Nature Conservancy Council The Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) was a United Kingdom government agency responsible for designating and managing National Nature Reserves and other nature conservation areas in Great Britain between 1973 and 1991 (it did not cover Northern ...

(NCC) released a report in London that was highly critical of the foresters. In 1988

Nigel Lawson Nigel Lawson, Baron Lawson of Blaby, (11 March 1932 – 3 April 2023) was a British politician and journalist. A member of the Conservative Party, he served as Member of Parliament for Blaby in Leicestershire from 1974 to 1992, and served ...

, the

Chancellor of the Exchequer The chancellor of the exchequer, often abbreviated to chancellor, is a senior minister of the Crown within the Government of the United Kingdom, and the head of HM Treasury, His Majesty's Treasury. As one of the four Great Offices of State, t ...

, scrapped the forestry tax reliefs in light of the harm caused to the United Kingdom's wilderness, halting further planting.

Ongoing conservation

In an effort to restore the damage, the

Royal Society for the Protection of Birds The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is a Charitable_organization#United_Kingdom, charitable organisation registered in Charity Commission for England and Wales, England and Wales and in Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, ...

(RSPB) have bought a large area in the centre of the Flow Country and have created the Forsinard Flows national nature reserve. More than 20 km² has been bought back from Fountain Forestry and the young trees felled and allowed to rot in the plough furrow in the hope and expectation that, in 30 to 100 years, the land will revert to peat bog. The RSPB was also a leading partner in the Flows to the Future Project, an ambitious, far-reaching project which aimed to restore vast areas of the Flow Country and increase public and visitor awareness of the importance of the Flow Country. The project funded the award-winning Flows Lookout Tower. Around 1500 km² of the Flow Country is protected as both a

Special Protection Area A special protection area (SPA) is a designation under the European Union Directive on the Conservation of Wild Birds. Under the Directive, Member States of the European Union (EU) have a duty to safeguard the habitats of migratory birds and cer ...

and

Special Area of Conservation A special area of conservation (SAC) is defined in the European Union's Habitats Directive (92/43/EEC), also known as the ''Directive on the Conservation of Natural Habitats and of Wild Fauna and Flora''. They are to protect the 220 habitats and ap ...

under the name Caithness and Sutherland Peatlands. The Flow Country was designated a UNESCO

World Heritage Site World Heritage Sites are landmarks and areas with legal protection under an treaty, international treaty administered by UNESCO for having cultural, historical, or scientific significance. The sites are judged to contain "cultural and natural ...

in 2024. It is one of three World Heritage natural landscapes in the United Kingdom. The others are the Giants Causeway in County Antrim and the

Jurassic Coast The Jurassic Coast, also known as the Dorset and East Devon Coast, is a World Heritage Site on the English Channel coast of southern England. It stretches from Exmouth in East Devon to Studland Bay in Dorset, a distance of about , and was ins ...

in Dorset.

Rail access

The

Far North Line The Far North Line is a rural railway line entirely within the Highland area of Scotland, extending from Inverness to Thurso and Wick. As the name suggests, it is the northernmost railway in the United Kingdom. The line is entirely single-tra ...

connects into Forsinard station serving the area.

References

External links

The Flow Country websiteRSPB Forsinard Flows ReserveRSPB Flow Country AppealPeat bogs on SNH
{{RSPB sites in Scotland Wetlands of Scotland Caithness Landforms of Sutherland Rural Scotland Protected areas of Highland (council area) Landforms of Highland (council area) World Heritage Sites in Scotland Ramsar sites in Scotland Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Scotland