As Scotland's Flow Country joins Serengeti as World Heritage site, here's why we should value it more

However, the thing that makes it worthy of World Heritage Status – putting it alongside the likes of the Grand Canyon, the Serengeti, the Galapagos Islands, and the Great Barrier Reef – is the sheer scale of this stark but stunning landscape.

Professor Roxane Anderson, an expert in peatlands, described it as “the most expansive and best example of blanket bog in the world”, adding it was “an extraordinary natural laboratory”, and “a stronghold for biodiversity”. In other words, it is one of nature’s last great redoubts on a planet increasingly shaped and dominated by humans.

Blanket bog, a place of perpetual dampness, can only form where rainfall is greater than evaporation, a climate many Scots will recognise. In the Flow Country, this has led to the laying down of layer upon layer of peat over thousands of years. In some areas, it can reach up to ten metres (33ft) deep.

The idea that a bog might be important would have struck our ancestors as bizarre. But today we know the natural processes that result in its formation help remove carbon from the atmosphere, thereby acting as a defence against global warming. In all, it is estimated to hold some 400 million tonnes of carbon.

Unfortunately, as the International Union for Conservation of Nature points out, the Flow Country has undergone a “massive change in land use” over the last few decades. Despite being “naturally treeless for over 4,000 years”, the 1980s saw the land drained and planted with conifer trees, with “vast areas” destroyed or damaged. These out-of-place commercial woodlands mostly did not thrive.

However, with its newly awarded World Heritage status, the poetically named Flow Country may now be seen with different eyes and recognised for what it is: a place of natural wonder, a true wilderness, and an ally as we struggle to stop climate change spiralling out of control.