Fylingdales Moor Wildfire, 2025: A Climate-driven Threat to the Natural and Historic Environment

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• What happened?
• A climate-driven crisis
• The Fylingdales Moor Wildfire, 2025
  • Threat to lives, livelihoods and property
  • Impacts on the historic environment
  • Impacts on the natural environment 
• Takeaways from the 2025 Fylingdales Moor Wildfire

What happened?

On the 26 June 2025, a fire broke out in Langdale Forest in the North York Moors National Park. This fire burned for several weeks before spreading to Langdale Moor on the 11 August 2025. After the fire spread across 5 square kilometres in only two days, on 13 August the North Yorkshire Fire & Rescue Service (NYFRS) declared a ‘major incident’ – this fire would come to cover the wider Fylingdales Moor.

 Dry conditions had created a significant risk of fire on the moors, and a later NYFRS investigation determined the trigger to likely be someone cooking outdoors. The wildfire grew and spread over a large area, lasting over forty days. By November, the area had moved to the ‘recovery stage’, although smoke was still observed in a small number of areas until Christmas. The Fylingdales Moor Wildfire was one of the largest wildfires ever recorded in England, burning an area of around 18 square kilometres.

The wildfire had a profound effect on this natural and historic landscape, and to local lives and livelihoods:

• People: the fire put the community’s lives and livelihoods, as well as properties, at risk, and has reshaped the community’s relationship with their landscape. Examples of disruption include agricultural workers who have lost grazing land for their livestock and have been forced to find alternatives, and tourism businesses which were severely impacted.
• Heritage: the wildfire damaged land that embodied centuries of human-environment interaction. Not only did the fire expose archaeological features (making them vulnerable to rapid erosion), and threaten the integrity of designated heritage assets, but it also damaged the heritage value of the moor, as a cultural landscape and a repository of valuable peat. For more on the importance of peatland as a historic environment, please see our guidance.
• Nature: the fire radically altered the local ecological character, disrupting local ecosystems and destroying peat that in some places had taken centuries to accumulate.

The Fylingdales Moor wildfire was the culmination of many short- and long-term causes, but this case study will focus on how this event can be linked to the intensifying climate crisis, and how the wildfire’s impacts demonstrate the varied and significant effects that climate change is already having on the landscape of the UK.

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A climate-driven crisis

Due to ongoing climate change, many regions are experiencing shifts in weather patterns and an increased likelihood and intensity of extreme weather events. The UK is no exception to this global trend. In 2025, the Climate Change Committee stated that “There is now unequivocal evidence that climate change is making extreme weather in the UK more likely and more extreme. Across the UK, this looks like heatwaves, heavy rainfall, and wildfire-conducive conditions. The UK is not appropriately prepared for this.” With higher temperatures and dryer conditions, the UK’s landscapes are becoming more vulnerable to human ignitions sparking wildfires that can spread far and fast. This process can be in seen in 2025 on Fylingdales Moor.

In the spring and summer of 2025, the UK experienced unusually warm temperatures. According to the Met Office, the spring of 2025 was the warmest spring that the UK has experienced since records began in 1884. The Met Office also reported that this was followed by the warmest summer on record. This unprecedented warmth formed the context for the persistent droughts and heatwaves reported across 2025. The Environment Agency reported that there were a total of 319 drought and dry weather incidents in the UK in 2025. In June, the Environment Agency declared a drought in Yorkshire, meaning that conditions were ripe for the Fylingdales Moor wildfire that would break out two months later and cover an area of around 18 square kilometres (though the area of wider impact, including firebreaks, is likely closer to 25 square kilometres).

The Met Office is clear that the cause of this unusually warm summer is human-driven climate change: Met Office research determined that the high summer temperatures of 2025 were made 70 times more likely to occur by human-caused climate change. However, it is important to underline that 2025 also should not be seen as an anomaly. Met Office information shows that all of the top five hottest summers in UK history have happened since the start of the 21st century (2025, 2018, 2006, 2003, 2022), in line with rising global temperatures. Prior to 2025, a wildfire previously broke out on Fylingdales Moor in 2003, another one of the UK’s hottest summers on record.

In the context of 2025’s record-breaking heat, many wildfires broke out. Notable blazes spread in the Mediterranean basin, and the UK also experienced its largest ever amount of wildfire coverage in 2025 (with enormous wildfires breaking out on Fylingdales Moor and the Scottish Cairngorms), as well as an increase overall in the number of fires. Carbon Brief analysed data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS) and found that by August 2025, wildfires in the UK had covered an area of land greater than in any other year during the period recorded by GWIS (2012-2024) (see below).

In sum, there is a clear link between rising global temperatures and the creation of conditions that are perfect for the spread of large wildfires – this phenomenon forms the backdrop for the crisis that took place in the North York Moors National Park in the summer of 2025. For more information about how climate change is driving intense weather in the UK, please refer to information provided by the Met Office.

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The Fylingdales Moor Wildfire, 2025

The higher temperatures of 2025 directly impacted Fylingdales Moor – dry heather and peat, sunny breezy weather, and the unexploded ordinance found in the region meant that conditions were ripe for a major wildfire, which was then triggered by outdoor cooking. Previously, in 2003, the Fylingdales Moor also suffered a significant wildfire, but this fire only covered about 2.5 square kilometres, meaning that the 2025 event, at 18 square kilometres, was just over 7 times larger. The 2025 wildfire produced a diverse array of interconnected impacts, described below:

• (a) Threat to lives, livelihoods and property
• (b) Impacts on the historic environment
• (c) Impacts on the natural environment

(a) Threat to lives, livelihoods and property

People are an important part of the environment in the North York Moors National Park which, as local archaeology demonstrates, has been the case for thousands of years. These include tenants, landowners, and people working in agriculture and tourism, all of whom dedicate themselves to the maintenance of this important and much-valued landscape. The wildfire of 2025 posed a serious threat to the lives and properties of many of these people, including to those who put themselves at risk to slow the spread of the wildfire. The following aerial survey photographs show this danger clearly.

(b) Impacts on the historic environment

The landscape of the North York Moors National Park may seem natural, but it looks this way due to generations of human activity, managing, changing, and venerating the land to meet peoples’ needs over time. The area is itself a heritage asset, carrying a range of meanings for the various groups that visit and enjoy it, making it a shared resource of significant cultural value. The moors form a rich landscape of interwoven layers of archaeology, from prehistory right through to the present. Much of this tangible heritage was impacted by the wildfire, some of it irreversibly so.

To date, 27 Scheduled Monuments and 6 Listed structures were within the area of the wildfire, many of which suffered damage during the blaze. The damage caused by the fire went beyond designated assets. Where peat deposits are substantial, peatlands can create exceptional conditions for preserving organic archaeological materials because their waterlogged, low-oxygen, and acidic environments dramatically slow decay. On the moor, the fire burnt through vegetation and peat in some areas, exposing both known and unknown archaeological features – some associated with known heritage assets and others previously unrecorded.

Moreover, in efforts to contain the fire, approximately 50 kilometres of firebreaks were constructed, typically 10–15 metres wide. In some locations this involved cutting down to the subsoil to remove peat and prevent it from fuelling the fire. While such measures are essential for effective firefighting, they can unintentionally disturb or damage archaeological deposits.

In sum, the burning of peat and vegetation and firefighting tactics impacted archaeological material on Fylingdales Moor; we do not know how much archaeological material has been lost entirely, but we do know that there are significant challenges ahead. There is a huge amount of newfound archaeology (exposed once the peat had burned off) that needs to be identified, recorded, and assessed before further erosion and damage takes place (e.g. caused by flooding and rain).

The damage caused by the wildfire was not limited to heritage from the distant past, however. The moor was used during the Second World War for various purposes, and heritage from this period was also affected. For example, the moor was used as:

• The site of bombing decoys – These were created to fool the Luftwaffe into attacking them instead of more significant targets elsewhere. One of these sites, the World War II bombing decoy, 500 metres north west of John Cross, was a Scheduled Monument) and was damaged in the fire.
• A live-firing range – this past usage made the wildfire even more dangerous, because the extreme heat would sometimes cause unexploded ordnance (UXO) to detonate, contributing to the spread of the blaze. At least 25 items have exploded, and the risk has made firefighting operations and safe access after the fire highly dangerous. This danger necessitates careful health and safety measures, as well as collaboration with the Ministry of Defence.

(c) Impacts on the natural environment

Much of the land affected by this wildfire was peatland, which has significant environmental and ecological implications.

The significance of peatlands is described further in a recent Government memorandum:

Peat as a Carbon store

Peat deposits are carbon-rich. According to the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, healthy peatland vegetation captures CO2 through the process of photosynthesis, and because peat doesn’t decompose entirely, this carbon is not released back into the atmosphere but forms a carbon store as the CO2 becomes locked into the landscape. In the UK alone, 3.2 billion tonnes of CO2 are stored in peatland in this way. For context, the UK in 2024 produced an estimated 413.7 million tonnes of carbon equivalent (Climate Change Committee, 2025). This means that roughly 7.5 times more much CO2 is stored in the UK’s peat than was emitted by the entire country in 2024.

Consequently, when peat is burned, this stored carbon is released. Recent research from the University of Cambridge found that even though peatland accounts for only a quarter of the land that is burnt by wildfires each year in the UK, “wildfires that burn peat have caused up to 90% of annual UK fire-driven carbon emissions since 2001 – with emissions spikes in particularly dry years.”

While we have yet to learn exactly how much peat was lost, and how much carbon was emitted, the Fylingdales Wildfire is likely to have contributed a significant amount of carbon dioxide to the UK’s total wildfire emissions in 2025. Data from the GWIS reveals that, just as 2025 was a leading year in terms of number of fires and coverage area, the year also saw the greatest amount of CO2 produced by wildfires in the period 2003-2025, reaching a total of over 1.4 million tonnes of CO2 as of mid-October 2025.

Though there are many peatland restoration initiatives across the UK, these will take time to produce results. Deep peatland deposits can reflect centuries of growth, only to be rapidly destroyed by a wildfire.

Cascading climate risks

A cascading climate risk describes how an initial climate event triggers a chain reaction of impacts across connected systems. Peatland wildfires have exceptionally far-reaching and long-lasting cascading impacts because peat acts as a carbon store, a water regulator, and a soil-forming system.

Cascading impacts include:

• Increased flood risk: as the IUCN UK Peatland Programme explains, peatlands act as natural stores of water, trapping it both within the soil itself and also keeping water on the surface. This then lowers the risk of flooding during occasions of heavier rainfall. Conversely, if the peat is burned or destroyed, it will lose its sponge-like, absorption capacity for water, which can flow more easily over the surface without being trapped or slowed to the same extent. This heightens the risk of flooding off the moor/downstream flood damage, and of soil erosion and silting elsewhere.
• Water insecurity: with peatlands regulating flow during wet and dry periods, their destruction means drought-flood cycles can become more extreme and there can be reduced base flows. Also, without peat to filter the water, local water quality could decrease. This can have further consequences including acidification, algal blooms, or even increased water treatment costs.
• Biodiversity and Ecological Impact: since peatlands are major habitats for local biodiversity, their destruction will lead to the loss of species reliant on peatland conditions or mosses, or disruption of wildlife movement.

Once peatlands burn, the intricate, complex environments can change entirely from a remarkable ecosystem to an eroding, flood-prone landscape.

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Takeaways from the 2025 Fylingdales Moor Wildfire

In the aftermath of this event, what has been done and what needs to be done?

• Historic England was responsible for the initial aerial survey, a rapid response that meant we could capture and share data with partner organisations. Surveying has continued after the disaster, e.g., in November 2025, Historic England captured drone-based lidar and aerial imagery to assess the condition of the rapidly eroding cross dyke on Shooting House Moor, which was provided to the NYMNPA. Working with the National Park, areas of the monument that were at risk could be identified and conservation work rapidly implemented.
• Historic England has been working with the North Yorkshire Local Resilience Forum (NYLRF), which has involved coordinating with stakeholders during the response phase, working on environmental recovery, and planning for what the new normal will look like. It would be beneficial for Historic England to make connections with similar Local Resilience Forums across the country, so that we are prepared to help in the event of similar emergencies.
• Historic England has been collaborating with the North Yorkshire Moor National Park, landowners and other stakeholders to produce risk assessments for ground surveys. This is important for accessing parts of the moorland known to have unexploded ordinance risks, as well as clear public rights of way (which remain closed at this time).
• In November 2025, Historic England's National Grants Panel approved a £100,000 regional capacity building grant for the North York Moors National Park Authority to support training and development of remote sensing techniques. This grant will build the capacity of the NYMNPA to respond to a wildfire of this scale. Due to the wide scale of impact, the urgency of the conservation issues, and the short timescale for funding, a rapid archaeological response was needed – remote sensing was therefore chosen over traditional surveying techniques. Drone and ground surveying will be used to rapidly record and assess the significance of revealed archaeological remains and the impact of the fire; the data will inform recovery efforts, survey and response strategies, and wider conservation management. As of June 2026, 30% of the burned area of Fylingdales Moor has been subject to remote sensing survey. There is also a legacy challenge to fund more detailed analysis of the Fylingdales landscape using the remote sensed data.
• In June 2026, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs announced the provision of up to £3.2m to restore land affected by the Fylingdales Moor wildfire. According to the CEO of the NYMNPA, “This investment will enable us to begin repairing the extensive firebreaks that were created to contain the blaze, re-establishing peatland habitats, stabilising vulnerable areas and creating a landscape that is better able to withstand the challenges posed by a changing climate.”

It is essential that regional and national stakeholders can collaborate smoothly during a disaster like this, to limit impacts during the event and to speed recovery afterwards. This is even more essential considering that climate change is making these events more likely. A dual approach is needed, which combines adaptation and mitigation:

• Adaptation: Regional and national strategies must be developed to improve local resilience to these increasingly frequent crises (e.g., wildfires, flooding, etc), and more work is needed to boost the preparedness of both local fire & rescue services and other authorities/agencies to tackle blazes in the historic environment specifically. Engagement with land managers is also essential, to ensure that a proactive approach is being taken to risk management to make wildfires less likely.
• Mitigation: A society-wide effort is needed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and stop our degradation of the environment. Over the long term, this will limit rising temperatures and make events like these less likely to happen in the first place.

The Fylingdales Moor Wildfire demonstrates how climate change touches all parts of our society, as this crisis affected lives and livelihoods, irreplaceable heritage, and the natural environment. These cross-cutting impacts can only be effectively tackled by an interconnected effort from across society.