MIKE BAGSHAW, countryside writer and outdoor education leader, heads out to witness one of the greatest wildlife spectacles.

THE high moors to the north of Ryedale are celebrating their annual blaze of glory at the moment.

During July, many roadsides sported alternate strips of cerise bell heather or pale pink cross-leaved heath, but the bulk of the moor still wore its dowdy, green/ brown winter cloak.

This month, though, the common ling heather has flowered en masse, turning hillsides into rolling seas of purple. This is one of the great wildlife spectacles of Britain – a sight for sore eyes that many travel a long way to see, and here it is on our doorstep.

While the big picture is undoubtedly astonishing, examining the detail is also worth doing. If you look closely, you may notice white patches on the lilac carpet, as if some of last winter’s snow-drifts had somehow remained un-melted.

Close-up, they become thousands of tufty, cotton grass flower-heads – plants that mark the particularly boggy parts of the moors.

Zoom in even further, down to ground level of one of these wet patches, and it becomes obvious that all the easily visible plants like cotton grass, bog asphodel and bog myrtle are actually growing up through a continuous, green, spongy skin.

This soggy blanket is made up of another living plant – a moss called sphagnum, or should I say ‘mosses’ as there are 120 species worldwide and 10 that live in Britain.

As a family, the sphagnums have one overwhelming ecological party trick; their leaves possess special chambers that can hold more than 20 times the plant’s own body weight of water.

This allows them to store it in times of plenty (like this May when it seemed to rain non-stop) and survive times of potential drought …like now.

Sphagnum’s absorbant properties are useful to others, of course; as anyone with a hanging basket will know, other plants rooted in the moss will stay moist.

Sphagnum does something else quite clever. Not only does it store water, but it deliberately acidifies it to inhibit bacterial growth. The main purpose of this strategy is to prevent the old, dead parts of the plant from rotting away so they can continue in their sponge action.

Dead, unrotted moss builds up over thousands of years into layers many metres thick – we call it peat.

Other plants growing in the sphagnum may not dry out, but they do suffer another problem, that of low nutrient levels in the acidic conditions.

Two of my favourite plants have overcome this problem in an ingenious way. They get the nitrogen and phosphorous they need from animals bodies by eating them.

Butterwort and sundew are two related carnivorous plants that catch insects on sticky leaves which then roll up and digest the dead bodies. Butterworts are quite easy to spot as they look for all the world like green starfish lying on the moss, but sundews are a lot less conspicuous.

It is worth getting wet knees for a close look at their fly-catching leaves though – delicate red spoons with sparkly blobs of glue on stalks that give the plant its name.

Historically, humans have taken advantage of the anti-bacterial properties of sphagnum by using the moss as an emergency, sterile wound dressing, but for us in Ryedale, in particular, its greatest importance is in flood prevention.

After heavy rain, the hundreds of square miles of sphagnum on the moors hold back millions of tons of water that would otherwise burst the banks of our rivers and end up in the streets of Malton.

To see one of the richest sphagnum bogs in England, visit Fen Bog near the Hole of Horcum – a fabulous nature reserve run by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust.

For more information, go to www.ywt.org.uk