At the end of September, you may have caught an unusual sight as you travelled down the mountain road through the valley.
The Peat Team have recently enlisted the aerial help of a helicopter to lift bundles of larch logs onto the current restoration site in the west of the Elan Valley.
These logs will in turn be used to build timber dams across the site to hold back water and raise the water table, which over time, will help create peat-forming conditions.
The team always look for the least invasive and lowest carbon option when restoring the peatlands in the Elan Valley.
However, due to the scale of degradation, simple peat dams or handwork are not always an option!
Due to the volume of material required for this site, the tried-and-tested method of airlift was the only option to minimise environmental damage.
We acknowledge the high carbon output of this form of transport, which is why the work was done as efficiently as possible, reducing the number of lifts required to just a day and a half. The alternative to airlifts would be moving logs on site via a tracked dumper; not only would this take up to a month, the damage to the vegetation and peat would be insurmountable.
The helicopter offers a damage free route to take materials onto the site quickly to enable long-term carbon store and sequestration.
