Michael McCarthy: Accountants' wheeze unleashed an environmental disaster

To the postwar forestry industry, and to the accountants who caught on, it was a corking wheeze; to conservationists it became a double disaster.

The large-scale planting of conifers, tax free, transformed much of Britain's open landscape in the 1960s and 1970s, and when it reached its peak in the 1980s it began to destroy one of the most precious wilderness areas in Britain.

Then, when the Government's own wildlife advisers hit back and tried to stop it, their agency was dismembered in a remarkable act of political spite.

Such was the story of the Flow Country, the unique wild expanse of blanket peat bog that covers much of Caithness and Sutherland in Scotland's far north, and which is home to some of the UK's rarest wildlife.

In the 1970s it began to be affected by the mass conifer afforestation that had taken place over much of Britain because the cost of planting could be set against other income as a tax relief. And the Flows, as they were known, had a special attraction; they were flat.

Before conservationists had realised the scale of what was happening, the Government's Forestry Commission and a particularly active private forestry company had ploughed up tens of thousands of acres of the peatlands, a landscape unchanged since the Ice Age, and covered them with trees.

But in the mid-Eighties Britain's official wildlife agency, then the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC), decided to try to call a halt and published a report on what was happening. Birds, Bogs and Forestry pulled no punches. "Of all terrestrial habitats in Britain, these blanket bogs are the largest example of a primaeveal ecosystem," the report said. "However, their continued survival is now under threat. Coniferous afforestation is destroying these peatlands."

The intervention of the NCC enraged forestry interests in Scotland and their supporters in both the Scottish aristocracy and the Scottish Office, and they appealed to the Scottish Secretary at the time, Malcolm Rifkind, to have the NCC broken up. Mr Rifkind successfully sold the plan to the Environment Secretary, Nicholas Ridley, who in 1989 ordered that the agency be divided into agencies for England, Scotland and Wales.

The last NCC chairman, Sir William Wilkinson, said that Mr Ridley's action had set back the cause of nature conservation in Britain by at least five years; some observers believe that events of the past decade have proved this to be an underestimate. But such was the scale of the dispute that large-scale planting in the Flow Country did stop. The scheme announced yesterday is the beginning of the repairs.