Over the past few months, we’ve been working with Cumbria Wildlife Trust on an ambitious landscape restoration and interpretation project, exploring how the recovery of some of Cumbria’s most important peatlands can also create new ways for people to understand, experience and connect with these extraordinary places. Peatlands are becoming something of a specialism for us.
As landscape architects and interpretation specialists, we are particularly interested in landscapes undergoing change, where ecology, culture, climate and human experience are closely intertwined. Peatlands bring all of these strands together. They are landscapes where some of the most important stories are hidden beneath the surface, and where restoration can take decades, even centuries, to unfold.
Our work lies in helping make those complex processes understandable and meaningful, bringing together landscape design, ecological storytelling, heritage, interpretation and visitor experience.
At the heart of the Cumbria project are two very different landscapes: the vast uplands of Skiddaw Forest and the lowland peatlands of the Witherslack Mosses.
Both are landscapes undergoing significant change. Cumbria Wildlife Trust is working to restore their peatlands, hydrology and habitats, creating healthier, more resilient landscapes for wildlife, climate and future generations. At Skiddaw Forest, this is a process that will unfold over decades and centuries, while at Witherslack Mosses, visitors can already encounter a remarkable landscape of recovering peatland, wet woodland and wildlife. Working alongside this restoration, we are developing the landscape and interpretation strategy that will help reveal what is happening, why it matters and how people can engage and become part of the story.
Peatlands are quiet and enigmatic places. Yet beneath our feet lies a living archive of layers, formed over thousands of years and holding traces of changing climates, landscapes, wildlife and people. Today, these same landscapes have a vital role to play in storing carbon, managing water, supporting biodiversity and helping us respond to a changing climate.
Much of this work is difficult to see. Restoring water levels, rebuilding peat, recovering habitats and allowing ecological processes to return can happen slowly and subtly.
So one of the central questions for us is: how can landscape design, interpretation and creativity make these invisible processes visible and meaningful?
Our work so far has taken us out into the landscape with Cumbria Wildlife Trust, alongside conversations with ecologists, land managers, communities and many stakeholders. We are exploring the history and ecology of each place, how people experience them today, and how those experiences might evolve as the landscapes themselves recover.
We are also working alongside four diverse artists, bringing different creative perspectives into the project and exploring new ways to engage people with landscape restoration. Rather than relying solely on traditional interpretation panels, we are considering experiences that might be physical, digital, sensory, playful and artistic.
At Skiddaw Forest, that means allowing interpretation to sit lightly within a vast and remote landscape, protecting its powerful sense of wildness while opening its story to people who may never be able to physically reach it. At Witherslack, there is an opportunity to create a rich and accessible visitor journey through wildlife, water, peat, human history and deep time.
Could we experience these landscapes from the perspective of a bird, an insect or an adder? Could a peat core make thousands of years of landscape history tangible? Could sound, storytelling, art and play reveal what is happening beneath the surface?
This project is also building on a growing strand of Mei Loci’s work around landscape restoration, climate resilience and ecological interpretation. We are interested not simply in interpreting nature, but in helping people understand landscapes as living systems: how they have changed, how they are being repaired, and what their recovery could mean for the future.
Ultimately, this is about more than restoring peatland or telling people about it. It is about restoring relationships between people and landscape.
These places have been shaped over thousands of years, transformed dramatically within a few human generations, and are now entering another chapter.
Peatland is quickly becoming one of our favourite things.
