More Heatwaves

If you are of a certain age, I’m sure you’ll remember the long, hot summer of 1976 which was legendary as the heatwave brought scorching temperatures to the UK. As Britain swelters through another spell of record-breaking heat, the language around summer has begun to change. When you listen to the weather forecast, the presenters still talk about sunshine and soaring temperatures, about beaches and barbecues, but we now hear words such as climate change, heat index and wildfires, a vocabulary that didn’t exist when I was growing up. With the new lexicon, there is also a new feeling. When this hot weather sits over us, particularly for communities that have lived through wildfire, extreme heat carries a different feeling entirely, not excitement, but apprehension.

Smoke and Fire

For many people, heat still means holidays, cold drinks in pub gardens and evenings spent outdoors. But in places scarred by recent fires, a run of hot, dry days now feels ominous. The air itself begins to feel threatening. You notice the colour of the grass. The absence of rain. The strength and direction of the wind.

You remember the smoke.

The smoke that hung in the air for weeks this time last year when the hills above Strathspey burned.

For days, smoke drifted across the moorland beyond Grantown-on-Spey, carried on a dry easterly wind. The initial alert seemed to concern a fire near Carrbridge, but then another fire broke out up towards Loch Allan. Between the two origin points, the fire divided, jumped across roads, and ate up the heather-covered peat slopes across the Dava moor. At first, this just seemed like another burning hillside, but the smoke and the flames did not die down, they spread, becoming fiercer. As roads began to be closed, the threat became real. From the edge of town, the distant hills disappeared behind a dirty brown haze. The familiar scent of pine and peat, usually comforting, with its hint of ancient memories, was replaced by the choking bitterness of burning heather and scorched earth.

The smoke moved strangely. We were walking through Anagach Woods when suddenly the smell of smoke became stronger. One moment the air seemed clear, but within seconds you found yourself enveloped in it, eyes stinging, throat raw, the visibility limited by the opaqueness but in such a way that it seemed as though your eyesight was failing. There is something deeply unsettling about wildfire wherever it attacks, but here in this ancient landscape of the Highlands it seemed alive in a terrifyingly real way. 

What frightened many people most was not simply the scale of the blaze, but where it might go next. The thought of losing Anagach Woods hung heavily over the town. Those Scots pines, twisted by centuries of Highland weather, are woven into the identity of Grantown itself. Generations have walked beneath them in winter frost and midsummer dusk. To imagine flames racing through those woods was almost unbearable.

And there was the town itself. How close was the fire going to get? Would the wind change? Would the rain come? Were those brave, unheralded heroes from the emergency services, the estates, and the volunteers with the skills to dig ditches and firebreaks and drive Argocats full of water to remote outposts, going to be able to contain it?  Helicopters thudded overhead. Fire crews worked through exhausting shifts. Roads closed. Conversations in cafés and on street corners revolved around wind direction and rainfall forecasts. Everyone seemed to be watching the sky. On this occasion, Mother Nature herself lent a helping hand. A change in the wind direction and heavy rainfall on the 30^th June allowed the firefighters to get the fire under control meaning we could all rest easily that night. 

Recovery and Renewal

The fire on the Dava Moor felt, in many ways, like a warning from the landscape itself. How could anything survive the ferocity of that blaze? Yet, less than a year later, the moor has begun to bloom again. Driving back from Forres the other day we were treated to a display of dancing white flowers, glistening in the sunshine like a covering of summer snow. Bog cotton to the uninitiated (that’s me – I’m definitely no botanist), but heather, mosses, and other plants too are making a comeback. Isn’t Mother Nature amazing? Reading through a local naturalist’s Facebook post earlier today, listing the Latin names of the returning species one by one, felt strangely moving: Eriophorum angustifolium, Eriophorum vaginatum, Calluna vulgaris, Erica cinerea, Trichophorum germanicum, Vaccinium myrtillus, Narthecium ossifragum,Drosera rotundifolia. Beautiful names which sadly don’t mean much to me, but the sight of the acres of white gently swaying in the breeze tells me that my heart belongs in the Highlands.  

It can seem extraordinary that life returns so quickly after devastation, but ecologists have long understood that fire is often part of the natural cycle of moorland landscapes. Many peatland and heathland plants are remarkably adapted to disturbance. Fire clears away accumulated dead vegetation, opens the ground to sunlight, and releases nutrients back into the soil. Beneath the surface, root systems and seeds can survive even intense burns, waiting for the chance to regenerate.

Cotton grass in particular often flourishes after fire because it thrives in exposed, wet peat where competition from taller shrubs has been temporarily reduced. Fresh growth appears rapidly, stabilising the damaged ground and helping begin the slow ecological recovery of the moor.

That does not mean wildfire is harmless. Far from it. Severe fires can damage peat deeply, releasing huge stores of carbon and destroying habitats that take decades to recover. Some scars remain visible for years. The danger to wildlife, woodland and communities is real and growing.

Jasper – Another Community Devastated by Fire

Earlier this year, those memories returned unexpectedly during a visit to Jasper National Park in Canada, itself still recovering from the devastating wildfire of 2024. The scale there was almost impossible to comprehend. Around 25,000 residents, workers and visitors were evacuated as flames swept through the mountain town, while 358 buildings, roughly a third of the town’s structures, were destroyed. More than 800 housing units were lost, leaving countless families displaced and uncertain whether they would ever return to the homes they had known. It was eerie as we drove in to see encampments of container buildings, each one housing a family displaced by fire. How close we came to that in our community really made us empathise with the locals there. 

Walking through Jasper, there were still visible scars everywhere. Entire streets had gaps where houses once stood. Burned trunks lined parts of the valley like blackened matchsticks. Some hillsides looked as though the colour had been permanently erased from them. Even driving up to the ski resort at Marmot Basin showed what power the fire had. There is a section as you turn off the main highway and start climbing up where it is obvious that trees had once stood, rooted into the ground, providing shelter and protection. Now gone, that same landscape is bare and it is on the move. Without the trees to hold it all together the mountain is shifting, loosened rocks emerge from the fragile earth and tumble down the mountainside. It is a game of chance as you take your turn to drive the short, exposed section not quite knowing if you’re going to make it before a rockfall. We only had one occasion where we had to stop and clear rocks out of the way, but it was a stark reminder that fire really does affect the whole landscape. 

And yet life, quietly and stubbornly, was returning to Jasper too. Wildflowers had begun appearing beneath the burned forests. Aspen saplings were pushing through the ash. Timid mule deer grazed on the fresh shoots. Cafés had reopened. Visitors had returned. Builders hammered away at new homes while locals spoke not only about what had been lost, but what might come next.

Some people we talked to had made a decision not to rebuild, not to return, not to live with the terrifying threat of it happening again, but others were more optimistic, seeing hope, resilience and new opportunities. There was grief in Jasper, certainly, but there was also determination.

Resilience and Regrowth

Perhaps resilience after wildfire does not mean returning to exactly what existed before. Forests regrow differently. Communities change. People carry the memory of smoke and fear long afterwards. But recovery reveals itself in small acts: children returning to school, visitors coming back to walk familiar paths, fresh green growth appearing where the ground once seemed dead.

Standing on the Dava Moor now, with cotton grass moving across the peat like waves on water, it is impossible not to think about that same resilience.

The fire showed the terrifying power of nature: its capacity to overwhelm, threaten and humble us completely. Yet the months since have revealed another side to that same power: recovery, renewal and the stubborn persistence of life.

And perhaps that is why these current heatwaves feel different now.

Once, hot weather simply felt pleasant. Now it can feel foreboding, particularly in places that remember what happened the last time. Sunshine no longer arrives without questions attached to it. How long since the last rain? How dry is the peat? How strong is the wind today? Because once you have seen a landscape burn, you never quite look at heat in the same way again.

On the blackened moor above Grantown-on-Spey, as in Jasper far across the Atlantic, beauty has returned not in spite of the fire, but partly because of what survived it.

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