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Callum pulled his waterproof collar tight against the sleet , his rubber boots sinking five inches into copper - coloured bog moss . Ahead of him across the expanse of Caithness , the northern horizon dissolved into endless pewter sky and horizontal drizzle . Beside a deep artificial furrow , a wide - tracked excavator idle - churned its diesel engine , its seven - ton chassis listing dangerously toward an ancient drainage gully . It was the disastrous tax loopholes of the nineteen - eighties that had scarred this remote plateau , when private forestry syndicates plowed thousands of miles of deep furrows to plant rows of alien Sitka spruce . What had once been Europe's greatest continuous blanket bog had been systematically bled of its moisture . Nowhere in the British Isles does peatland hold such staggering volumes of sequestered carbon . Yet for four decades , these dry drainage scars had oxidized that subterranean wealth , venting millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while leaching tea - coloured silt into Atlantic salmon pools . What the restoration team faced each autumn was not merely forestry clearance , but a race against seasonal freezing . If the winter snows arrived before the contractors felled the self - seeded conifers and flattened the furrows , the exposed peat cliffs would crumble into irreversible erosion . What Callum needed to achieve this morning was a complete hydrological block along contour four . Seldom had he seen an operator handle an excavator with such delicate nerve ; one heavy slip upon the floating turf , and the machine would sink to its axles in saturated sphagnum . Working with a curved backhoe bucket , the driver carved dense blocks of wet peat from the donor ditch , inverted them , and compacted them firmly across the channel . Not until the third peat dam was tamped into place did the black water halt its escape . Within twenty minutes , an amber pool began to swell behind the barrier , drowning the bleached stumps of long - dead heather . It was this rising water table that would rekindle the living moss , sealing millennia of ancient carbon beneath a wet , emerald skin . Callum waved to the driver to advance down the line . Across the vast northern wilderness , the bog was reclaiming its slow , breathing silence .
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