This Is What's Left of Saddleworth Moor After the Worst Wildfire in Memory

Driving through Carrbrook – an area of east Stalybridge, Greater Manchester – it resembles a fairly typical English village. Cows graze happily on lush green grass, elderly men play bowls on the local green and there's an honesty box outside the local farm, where you leave £1 and take half a dozen eggs in return. If you look up at the hills and valleys of the nearby moorland, you'll see incandescent colours sparkling under the summer sun.

Look the other direction, though, and you'll see a glaze of charred black.

Several weeks ago, fires tore across this moorland, between Saddleworth Moor and residential Carrbrook. The wildfires have been described as some of the worst in the UK's living memory.

Walking up onto the moorland now is a strange experience. The land resembles a black desert, everything from wooden fence posts to vegetation charred an ashy black. The scorched ground feels eerily post-apocalyptic, but amid the wasteland sprouts of green are reappearing – signs of life after death. Walking along the burnt paths, thick black dust clouds kick up from your feet with every step. The deeper into the moorland you walk, the heavier the smell gets" a thick, musty, smoky, charcoal.

The initial blaze broke out on the 24th of June, and it wasn't until over three weeks later – on the 18th of July – that it was properly extinguished and fire services left the area. The fire came so close to the residential area that many Carrbrook residents were evacuated. Fortunately, nobody was hurt or hospitalised, although sadly a string of animal corpses were found on the moorlands from those unable to escape the flames.

Sixty-five-thousand gallons of water were used within three days of the fire starting, and 2,000 acres of moorland were destroyed in the same time. Financially, the costs are likely to add a healthy bump to the £55 million already spent annually on fighting wildfires in the UK.

Local resident Wayne Harris tells me that, despite the fire being officially extinguished, there are still some areas smouldering. Guillermo Rein, Professor of Fire Science at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Imperial College London, explains why: "One thing that we have in the UK that doesn't exist in the rest of the Europe is peat fires, which usually happens after the flames. They take much longer to extinguish and they can last for weeks. Whenever you have a fire in the UK it leaves behind a big smouldering peat fire too."

"You couldn't see a thing," says local resident Steven Sharrock of the fires, before inviting me into his house and taking me through to his pristine back garden to demonstrate just how engulfed the nearby estate was in smoke. "Bang, bang, bang… all the way around," he says, illustrating with his hands where the fire spread around his home. "It was absolute madness. You couldn't leave the house because of the smell. If you opened the doors, that was it – it was just smoke all inside."

Another resident, John Oliver, was away when the fires started, and didn’t think much of them when he was first told they had broken out. "We weren't overly bothered, to be fair," he says. "We thought it would just go out, because we have fires every year, but when it went from local news to national news we knew it was serious. A friend of mine from Houston sent me a message saying it was on the news over there too."

John wasn't worried about his, home, though and takes a fairly light-hearted view of the whole experience. "I think people were excited that something was happening," he says with a laugh. "Because something was actually going on in Carrbrook."

One resident who certainly wasn't excited is Jane Keats, who lives on a nearby farm. Walking up her driveway, the singed black ground comes within yards of her land; her property was one of the closest to the fire. "It was scary," she says. "They asked us to evacuate but we didn't. We have animals here."

Jane stuffed wet towels at the base of her doors, brought the animals indoors and took it in turns with her husband to watch the fire's progress through the night. "We basically just spent days watching the fire grow and get closer and closer to us," she tells me. "There were huge flames, but the smoke was truly awful – it just choked you. The house was just full of it. Even now we can't get rid of it."

The fire outgrew everyone's expectations, including the Fire Station Manager for Stalybridge and Mossley, Dave Swallow. "We thought it would take hours to extinguish, rather than weeks," he tells me. "There were large areas of smoke and the fire was deep down under the moors, making it a very challenging fire. We had more than 100 firefighters, plus specialist officers, dealing with seven separate fires on the moorland. It was clear to see how large it was, which is why we had to get assistance from the army to help us control and extinguish it."

While arson is the suggested cause of the initial fire, a second fire broke out because of the recent heatwave. The temperature, wind conditions and the degraded land all combined to form the perfect environment for fire to spread. "The fire was much bigger than the typical moorland fire you see in the UK," says Professor Guillermo Rein. "The size of this fire was exceptional." At its peak, it was spread over seven square miles.

So: is this huge moorland fire the beginning of the new normal?

This summer has seen a record-breaking series of wildfires across the UK, with blazes burning across Aberystwyth, Gwynedd, Somerset and Lancashire, while experts such as Kathryn Brown from the Committee on Climate Change have suggested that the kind of heatwaves we are experiencing now will become more commonplace due to global warming. Are we more likely to see fires across the UK as temperatures continue to rise?

"Yes," says Guillermo, definitively. "Because of climate change, because of the increase in population, and because of land changes in the UK, the frequency of such fires is predicted to go up all over the UK. It's an ecosystem that is typically not flammable – it's wet and cold and it doesn't grow much vegetation – but when the temperatures are high and there is drought and wind, it becomes very flammable."

This all sounds pretty bleak, but beyond the inevitable increase of fires in the UK, Guillermo has some cause for optimism.

"There is a lot that can be done in the way of land management to prevent fires," he says. "I'm very hopeful, but I think the situation is going to get worse until someone with the capacity to make major decisions says: 'Okay, this is serious, let's go and listen to the experts.' We only tend to be called upon when things get bad. If we succeed in protecting the land and the environment, then nobody needs us and nobody calls us. It's a profession where our failure is noticed but our success is not."

Guillermo feels like we're entering a stage when the age-old adage of prevention being cheaper than the cure needs to be recognised. "The UK has a lot of fire experts for its size and population – it has powerful knowledge," he says. "The problem is that this knowledge needs to be implemented and applied to the real world."

@DanielDylanWray / @CBethell_photo