Flow Country
Tentative World Heritage site in Highland, Scotland, UK
The Flow Country (Scottish Gaelic: Dùthaich nam Boglaichean) is a vast area of bog peatland in Caithness and Sutherland, northern Scotland. It is the largest blanket bog in Europe, and covers about 4,000 km2 (1,500 mi2). It is an area of deep peat, dotted with bog pools, and is a very important habitat for wildlife. As peat is largely made up of the remains of plants, which are themselves made up of carbon, it locks up large stores of carbon for thousands of years. This carbon would otherwise be released to the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. In 2024 the Flow Country was awarded World Heritage status by UNESCO on account of its unparalleled blanket bog habitat. It includes the Forsinard Flows National Nature Reserve and the Caithness and Sutherland Peatlands.
Wildlife
The Flow Country is home to a rich variety of wildlife, and is used as a breeding ground for many different species of birds, including greenshank, dunlin, merlin and golden plover. Birds of prey found in the Flow Country include the buzzard and hen harrier.
One of the most prevalent plant species of the Flow Country is sphagnum moss, which can store large amounts of water, and eventually form peat – the building block of a blanket bog.
The public source identifies “Flow Country” as tentative World Heritage site in Highland, Scotland, UK. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Flow, Country and Tentative.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1847928. Authority coordinates are 58.371, -3.658. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2024.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Flow Country” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.