Wild Places
Peat bogs store more carbon than forests, and almost nobody visits them
Blanket bog is the least photogenic landscape in Europe and among the most important. Here is what is actually happening underfoot.
Wild Places
National parks, coastlines, deserts and the ecosystems inside them.
25 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 1 of 3
Wild Places
Coastal paths are eroding faster than the maps admit
Cliff-top routes across Europe are being rerouted inland every year. The maps, the signage and the guidebooks are all lagging behind.
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Wild Places
Dark sky reserves are about lighting design, not remoteness
A place does not become dark by being far away. It becomes dark because somebody redesigned every streetlight within twenty…
Wild Places
Ancient woodland is not just old trees
The value of ancient woodland is in the soil, the ground flora and the fungal networks. None of it can be replanted.
Wild Places
Machair, the grassland that only exists in two countries
A habitat made of crushed shell, wind and centuries of low-intensity farming. It exists on the western coasts of Scotland and…
Wild Places
Temperate rainforest exists in Britain and almost nobody knows
Fragments of Atlantic oakwood carry lichen and bryophyte communities found almost nowhere else on earth.
Wild Places
Chalk streams are rarer than most people realise
A large majority of the world's chalk streams are in one country, and almost all of them are under pressure.
Wild Places
Sand dunes are moving landscapes that we keep trying to stop
A dune system needs bare sand and movement to stay alive, which is the opposite of what stabilisation delivers.
Wild Places
Limestone pavement took ten thousand years and takes minutes to damage
A habitat formed by glaciation and dissolution, holding plants that grow nowhere else on the hill.
Wild Places
Machinery of a river: why straightened channels flood downstream
A century of straightening and dredging moved water faster, which moved the flooding to somebody else.
Wild Places
Reading a river before crossing, and the features to avoid entirely
Some hazards are visible from the bank and are absolute — strainers, undercuts and hydraulics take priority over convenience.
Wild Places
Seagrass meadows are the marine habitat nobody photographs
Underwater grassland stores carbon, stabilises sediment and nurses juvenile fish, and most of it has been lost.