Peatland Restoration – Invermark Estate

Through autumn 2022 we successfully completed 195ha of peatland restoration on Invermark Estate located on the fringes of the Cairngorms National Park.

Being at 650m above sea-level and with a high risk of being hit by early snowfall we made the decision to mobilise a total of six excavators to accelerate the completion time down to 10 weeks.  

On site we used x2 14T LGP Doosan and x4 8T Kobelco machines. This combination worked very well as the larger machines were able to handle the larger 3m+ hags on site and the 8T machines could reach the more awkward areas using their rotating/tilting buckets. 

The site brought on some challenges with lots of very soft areas that required careful negotiation, very large erosion features and fairly consistent coastal fog making navigation particularly difficult. 

In total we completed just under 53,000m of hag re-profiling, 3400 various dam features including peat, bunds, baffle and mineral, we spread sphagnum all over site and installed 30 timber dams. At the estates request we also installed grouse grit mounds as we progressed through the site.