A Steeton woman is “getting to grips” with work to restore Yorkshire’s peatlands.

Ceri Katz, a peatland restoration officer for the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, is working on a project to measure and assess peat coverage on the uplands in the region.

Ceri, who lives at Whitley Head, has braved poor weather conditions and trudged across the moors above Haworth and Oxenhope over the last couple of weeks. She walks more than seven kilometres a day searching for grips, which are drainage ditches cut into the ground.

The drainage channels are a legacy of land management after the Second World War designed to improve agricultural production and facilitate sheep grazing.

However, in many cases, the grips have served to compound peat erosion by drying out peatlands, resulting in a loss of carbon and bog habitat.

Ceri ventures out across the moors, including parts of the Yorkshire Dales, Nidderdale, North York Moors and the South Pennines, in search of more than four million grips that are often spaced 150 metres apart.

She uses a rod to measure the peat depth at a grip site and then marks it with a GPS handset.

Her work is part of a project called the Yorkshire Peat Partnership, which was established to restore peatland habitats for animals and plants and conserve peat as a carbon sink.

“The amount of carbon stored in peat is vast,” said Ceri. “We have to monitor the effects of erosion, otherwise instead of a carbon sink peat becomes a carbon source.

“We want to improve and stabilise these areas.”

In addition to the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, other agencies involved in the project include Natural England, the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, North York Moors National Park Authority and the Environment Agency.

Ceri, an avid climber, said she thoroughly enjoyed her work.

She said: “It keeps you fit and you get to go to places that you normally wouldn’t go.”