The Flow Country

Caithness and Sutherland, Scotland

The largest blanket bog in Europe, and the reason a wet, treeless, apparently empty landscape is one of Britain's largest carbon stores.

The ground under

The Flow Country, Caithness and Sutherland

58.3721, -3.8452 · keep going ↓

Core sample

0–100 cm

58.3721, -3.8452

0 cmSurface

The Flow Country, Caithness and Sutherland

Everything below this line is measured, not described.

8,922 plant records logged within about eight kilometres.

5 cmTopsoil

430.4g/kg

grams of organic carbon per kilogram of soil

The living layer: dead leaves, roots, bacteria, and the fungal threads that bind them into crumbs. Almost everything that happens to soil carbon happens here first.

30 cmThe stock

90t/haHigh

tonnes of organic carbon per hectare, top 30 cm

Approaching what settled grassland and mature woodland hold, where roots and fungal networks have been left undisturbed for decades.

ISRIC — World Soil Information

Modelled at 250-metre resolution from global soil surveys, and read from SoilGrids on 2026-09-01. SoilGrids publishes in versioned releases rather than continuously, so this figure is the current one until they publish again.

deeperThe network

634 fungal records near here

Each one is a specimen somebody found and wrote down. The species below are only the ones that fruit visibly; the threads that do the work almost never appear above ground at all.

GBIF — Global Biodiversity Information Facility

Each name links to the original record, with its collector, date and dataset.

Reading this figure

The figure above is carbon stock over the top thirty centimetres, and that is the wrong depth for peat. Peat here runs metres deep, so a reading taken from the first thirty centimetres of it captures a small fraction of what is actually stored and reports a peatland as though it were ordinary soil. Read it as a floor, not a total: the comparison it supports is with the other places on this site measured the same way, not with what is underneath this one.

Why this ground

Ground made of carbon

Peat is plant matter that never finished rotting, because water kept the air out. It is the densest carbon store on land, and it only holds while it stays wet.

Blanket bog forms where rain falls more often than the ground can drain, so dead plant matter sits in water and never finishes decomposing. What accumulates is not soil in the ordinary sense — it is the plants themselves, stacked and waterlogged, several metres deep and thousands of years old.

The Flow Country covers roughly four thousand square kilometres of Caithness and Sutherland and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2024, the first place given that status specifically for peatland. It holds more carbon than all the woodland in Britain.

Much of it was planted with conifers in the 1980s under a tax scheme that made drainage profitable. Draining a bog lets air reach the peat, and peat that meets air begins to burn slowly and invisibly, releasing carbon it took millennia to bank. A good deal of the work there now consists of blocking those drains again.

Read this against

Or measure somewhere else