On 18 January 2023, I set off to Kingsdale Head, a 607 ha site on the northwest corner of the Yorkshire Dales. To my aid was a fantastic team of five: Tim, our outgoing Peat Programme Manager; Dom, our Data and Evidence Officer; Joe and Rhiannon, our Peat Project Officers; and Emily, our Peat Project Assistant. We had everything prepared for an intense and icy day of coring as part of our Nature for Climate monitoring, collecting samples to send to the University of Manchester for analysis.

We rolled onto the moors, adorned in our winter regalia, peat poles poking from our rucksack pockets, endeavouring to keep a good grip on all the kit we were carrying. It’s easy to underestimate how heavy everything is until you’re faced with the sobering prospect of Kingsdale and its many, many rolling hills.

After 10 minutes of walking, we were perspiring beneath our winter clothing, with each few steps leading to layers being taken off. The hills had us fooled into thinking we’d be warm enough without coats and jumpers, but these were quickly thrown back on once we arrived at the dipwell plots. Yorkshire weather has a habit of being like that; in my 5 months at YPP, I’d learnt that no matter what the forecast tells you, make sure you have your suncream, woolly hat, sunglasses, and a thick jumper all in the same bag.

The team split into two; Dom led the installation of some new monitoring equipment (and that’s a blog post for another day!), while I led the coring. Kingsdale was gleaming in all its frosty splendour, and I was still hesitant about whether we’d get the corer into the ground in the first place.

Tim, Emily, and I trekked over to our first plot, tearing a gap in the web of hare’s-tail cotton grass which blanketed Kingsdale. To prevent the sample from being contaminated by surface vegetation, we needed to clear a small patch of bare peat to drive the corer into. Once we found an area which we believed to have peat deeper than 50 cm, between the dipwell plot and vegetation quadrat, Tim pierced the corer into the frozen ground with relative ease. Turning the handle 180° clockwise, the barrel sliced a 50 cm cylinder of peat from beneath our feet. Our 2 minutes of coring was about to unearth a sample that detailed hundreds of years of this landscape’s history.

As it often goes with peatland monitoring, getting it into the ground was one thing, while getting it out was a whole different kettle of fish. The surrounding peat was snuggled to the barrel of the corer, creating a quicksand-esque effect which made it very hard to pull back out. Of all the equipment that we use, losing a Russian corer is probably last on the list of things that we wanted to happen. It had never been so important to remember which way is clockwise, as anticlockwise would have unscrewed the barrel and handed it over to this sticky, peaty archive.

With Tim gripping the top of the corer while I hung from the bottom, we wrenched it from the grasp of the bog. Everything about peat coring had been such a grubby affair until we unveiled a perfectly preserved sample of peat from the barrel of the corer.

The core was incredibly striking. All 50 cm of it told a detailed and evolving story, from wet years to dry years, to the past use and management of Kingsdale’s landscape. The very bottom of the core was decorated with charcoal banding, an indicator of past burning and land clearance dating back circa 500 to 750 years. Tim could already tell a lot of this at first glance; while I was in too much awe to take most of this information in, I knew that the University of Manchester would be getting some brilliant results from these samples. These cores are muddy, messy, marvellous keys for unlocking our peatlands past, to understand more about caring for peatlands present.

Next came the careful, air-tight wrapping of the samples. This was the intention, however, the physical exertion that comes hand-in-hand with coring had put us through our paces over the course of the day. Carrying all the equipment, chasing after loose cling film and labels while wrapping up the core, trying to find the equipment, clingfilm and labels we put down all of 2 minutes ago. If there was such thing as a bog bleep-test, this was it. We got there in the end, with our bag for life choc-a-block with the weekly shop of Nature for Climate core samples, after a very successful day coring.

Tumbling down the hills on our way back to the car, we stopped to take in the last of the frosty vista and its beautiful, woody silhouettes.