Northern Scotland’s Flow Country becomes world heritage site

The Flow Country, a vast and unspoiled blanket bog that carpets the far north of Scotland, has been made a world heritage site by Unesco.

The planet’s largest blanket bog, the Flow Country covers about 1,500 sq miles of Caithness and Sutherland, and is the first peatland in the world to be designated by Unesco, after a 40-year campaign by environmentalists.

One of the world’s biggest carbon stores, it joins sites such as the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the Serengeti in Tanzania and the Grand Canyon in the US among the world’s most protected and treasured natural assets.

Related: World heritage status for Scottish peat bogs could help UK hit net zero goals

With peat as deep as 15 metres in places, ecologists had told Unesco the Flow Country was the best example on the planet of a crucial yet threatened ecosystem; it hosts a diverse range of specialist plants and wildlife that have evolved to live on blanket bogs and peatland.

Those plants include bogbean that displays vibrant pink-fringed white flowers in spring, carnivorous sundew, yellow-flowered bog asphodel and dozens of different species of sphagnum moss. It also supports dragonflies and rare bird species such as the dunlin, golden plover and red-throated diver.

Its dense peat, which has accumulated over the past 9,000 years, also stores roughly 400m tonnes of carbon. Meeting in Delhi, Unesco agreed with specialists from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that its preservation had even greater significance because of the climate crisis.

It was “the most extensive and diverse example of an actively accumulating blanket bog landscape found globally”, the IUCN said, following exhaustive surveys.

“Distinctive forms of blanket bog have evolved, exhibiting a diverse mosaic of mire and vegetation types with their associated species assemblages, including the full range of habitats from pools to drier hummock microsites including elements of damaged bog, transitional bog and fen communities.”

Graham Neville, who led the campaign to designate the site on behalf of NatureScot, the government conservation agency, said the decision was “momentous”.

“World heritage site status will lead to greater understanding of the Flow Country and raise the profile of Scotland’s peatlands globally for their value as biodiverse habitats and important carbon sinks,” he said. “It is a wonderful recognition of the expert stewardship of farmers and crofters in maintaining this incredible ecosystem as a natural legacy for future generations.”

The UK already has several world heritage sites, including the archipelago of St Kilda in the Atlantic, Stonehenge, the Tower of London, Georgian Bath and the old and new towns of Edinburgh.

Also on Friday, Unesco announced that Gracehill, a small 18th-century settlement in County Antrim in Northern Ireland, would join them. The Moravian church village was founded in 1759 by the Moravians, one of the oldest Protestant denominations in Christianity, dating back to the 15th century and preceding Martin Luther’s Reformation.

It is linked to other Moravian sites that already have Unesco world heritage status including settlements in Herrnhut in Germany and Bethlehem in the US.

Congratulating the campaigners, the UK culture minister Chris Bryant said Gracehill was “a town built around the central values of equality and tolerance and I am glad to see it gain the recognition that it deserves”.

While much of Northern Ireland’s Protestant heritage is linked to Scotland, the Moravian village is one of the exceptions, built by German-speaking Protestants on the back of a £2,000 loan from the wider religious community elsewhere in Europe.

The perfectly preserved village and green consists of small cottages, each with enough land to grow potatoes and keep a farm animal, as well as a school, a church and two larger houses for unmarried members of the community.

But there were bitter recriminations over one decision affecting the UK, when a proposal to put Stonehenge on the heritage in danger warning list was thwarted after Kenyan delegates successfully amended the decision.

Campaigners with the Stonehenge Alliance, including the historian Tom Holland, are trying to reverse a decision by the UK government to construct a widely criticised road tunnel under Stonehenge . They say it will destroy archaeological artefacts, and that the Unesco decision has undermined their faith in the ruling committee.

“This is a dark day for Stonehenge and a hollow victory for the UK government as this decision won’t stop the harm to the world heritage site,” said John Adams, the alliance’s chair. “We should not forget that this scheme failed the planning test. It was recommended for refusal because of the ‘permanent and irreversible’ harm it would do.”