Restoring the balance in the Flow Country

It's just a generation since government support paid for hundreds of miles of drains to be dug across deep peatland on the Campbell family's farm in the Sutherland Flow Country. The ambition in the 1960s was to improve hill grazing for North Country Cheviot sheep production - and the Campbells were far from alone in embracing the call for more productive or intensive farming.

Fast forward to the 2020s however, and peatland is no longer regarded as a wasteland but rather treasured as a habitat for rare wildlife and its ability to store carbon. Keeping it wet is paramount, and hill drains are no longer the solution, but the problem.

It took Joyce Campbell - a former Scottish Sheep Farmer of the Year - a couple of years to make the momentous decision to put local culture and tradition to one side and, with scientific and financial support, to embark on a fundamentally different approach to the land she manages. Hill drains were blocked, sheep numbers decimated and deer culled. The changes didn't happen without criticism from within farming circles but she hasn't looked back and now gets as much pleasure from seeing curlews breeding, trees regenerating and even dung beetles thriving as she once did from producing some of the country's best sheep.

Produced and presented by Nancy Nicolson