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The Peak District is a stunning landscape of hills and moorland. This dramatic landscape has been popular with walkers for many years and now parts of this landscape are under threat. The pressure of too many walkers, forest fires, pollution and climate change has taken its toll and this fragile habitat is in danger of disappearing taking with it precious moorland wildlife.

Presenter Sanjida O’Connell discovers that the main problem is peat erosion. In some areas the peat has eroded so badly that huge gulleys have been created all across the moors. The peat is a vital habitat for moorland birds such as dunlin, golden plover and red grouse and the Peak Districts’s most timid mammal the mountain hare.

It is not all depressing news, The Moors for the Future project is a £5 million programme to restore the moors. Sanjida goes right up into the hills to discover volunteers hard at work, planting grasses, pinning strips of material to the hillside. They are all trying to help stop further erosion of the moors.

She discovers a success story, the black grouse which became extinct from the moors in the 1980s due to loss of habitat is now returning due to a re-introduction programme run by Severn Trent.

Sanjida said: ‘I was really shocked by how badly degraded the moors were in certain places but heartened to see that local people were getting involved to save this landscape for the future.’