It's hyper-acidic. Thanks for that link - I'll get back and reread it. There's coal in the landscape, including anthracite, and that was exploited historically, rather than the peat. I burn a very small amount in the summer and it is my sole midge repellent. I've seen peat six feet deep on Smithills Moor, near Manchester, in a couple of places but there's nothing like that depth in the part of the North Pennines I frequent. The unusual thing in my peat deposits is a seam of bog oak pieces about halfway through. The bog oak fragments and pieces are usually knotty pieces and rootstock of Birch and Scotch pine and almost invariably have toolmarks, where they've been sliced off. I assume the bog oak is the remnant of some kind of forest regrowth chopping and associate it with early copper smelting in the valley below. I've tried to interest various archaeologists in the stuff but they seem brain dead - you'd suppose they'd be keen to hear of another early source of copper (but they're not). In some very dry summers the surface sphagnum dries out and dies - it turns yellow - and that is supposed to equate with a large amount of CO2 being released to the sky ...