Going Smoke-Free on the Moors: Why More Walkers Are Leaving the Cigarettes at Home

There’s a particular moment, familiar to anyone who walks regularly up here, when you crest the rise out of Haworth past Penistone Hill and the wind hits you properly for the first time. Whatever the forecast promised in the valley, the moor has its own ideas. It’s part of why we love this landscape – the Brontës built an entire literature on that wind – but it’s also, as it happens, one of several good reasons why smoking and moorland walking have never really got along.

This one’s a slightly different sort of post from our usual route guides, but it’s a subject that comes up more often than you’d think – on group walks, in the pub afterwards, and in emails from readers trying to give up cigarettes without giving up their hill days. So here it is: a practical look at why more walkers are going smoke-free on the hills, and what the alternatives actually look like in a rucksack.

Naked flames, dry peat and a stiff westerly

First, the serious bit, because it genuinely is serious. The moors around here – and their cousins over the tops at Marsden and Saddleworth – sit on deep peat. In a wet February it feels like the least flammable landscape in England. After a dry fortnight in spring, it’s tinder. Peat doesn’t just burn on the surface; it smoulders down into the ground and can keep going for days, destroying decades of habitat and releasing carbon that took centuries to lay down.

We’ve seen what that means in practice, close to home. The fires on Marsden Moor in recent years caused hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of damage – the big April 2019 blaze alone left a restoration bill of around £500,000 – and the National Trust’s rangers have repeatedly pleaded with visitors over the naked flames behind them: barbecues, fireworks and discarded smoking materials among the culprits found at fire sites.

The 2018 Saddleworth Moor fire, one of the largest English wildfires in living memory, burned for weeks across seven square miles of peat and heather. The Countryside Code doesn’t mince words either: be careful with naked flames and cigarettes, because fires can be as devastating to wildlife and habitats as they are to people and property.

A cigarette on the moor means a lighter, an open flame in a gusting wind, and a smouldering butt that has to go somewhere. Even the most careful smoker is carrying a small fire risk across a big fireground. Regulars on these moors will know the blackened patches that still scar some slopes — once you’ve walked through one, you don’t forget it.

The everyday case against it (fire aside)

Even setting the fire risk to one side, smoking mid-walk is simply a faff. Anyone who’s tried to light up in a Pennine crosswind knows the ritual: turning your back to the weather, hunching over cupped hands, getting through half a box of matches for one cigarette that then burns down in about ninety seconds flat. In rain – and let’s be honest, this is Brontë country, there will be rain – it’s worse.

Vaping solves the flame problem but introduces its own: batteries that sulk in the cold, pods that leak in a warm pocket, and a device that always seems to die at the exact moment you’re furthest from the car. And a lost or dropped disposable vape on moorland is a nasty piece of litter – plastic and a lithium battery in a protected habitat.

Then there’s the butt problem. Keep Britain Tidy’s research has found that cigarette butts account for roughly two-thirds of all littered items in the UK, and the filters are plastic – they don’t rot down like an apple core (which you shouldn’t chuck either, but that’s another post). Every serious walker already lives by the pack-it-in, pack-it-out rule for butty wrappers and banana skins. Cigarette ends are no different, except they’re easier to drop thoughtlessly and harder to spot once dropped.

The smokeless alternatives walkers actually use

So what do people use instead? Among the walkers we know who’ve moved away from cigarettes, three things come up again and again.

Patches are the fit-and-forget option: stick one on in the morning and it drip-feeds nicotine all day. No flame, no litter, no fiddling with cold fingers. The drawback is the lack of any “moment” – some people miss having something to actually do at the summit cairn.

Nicotine gum is the old faithful, and it works fine on the hill, though chewing gum for six hours has its limits, and the used piece still needs wrapping and packing out.

Nicotine pouches are the newer arrival, and they’ve quietly become popular in outdoor circles – they came out of Scandinavia, where cross-country skiers and hillgoers have used similar products for years, for exactly the reasons that matter on a hill. These are small white pouches, about the size of a piece of chewing gum, containing nicotine, flavouring and plant fibre – no tobacco leaf at all, which is why you’ll see tobacco-free nicotine pouches described as “white” pouches or “tobacco-free” to distinguish them from old-fashioned snus. They’re legal in the UK and strictly for over-18s.

Using one could not be simpler, which is rather the point in horizontal drizzle: take a pouch from the tin, tuck it under your upper lip against the gum, and leave it there. You’ll feel a tingle or slight warmth for the first few minutes — that’s normal — and the nicotine absorbs gradually through the gum over the next 20 to 40 minutes or so. No flame, no smoke, no vapour, no battery, and both hands free for your poles or your map. When you’re done, the used pouch comes out and goes in a bag or the little compartment most tins have in the lid — then home to a bin, packed out like everything else you carried in. A used pouch dropped in the heather is still litter; the whole advantage evaporates if it ends up on the ground.

A note on strength, for beginners

One thing worth getting right from the start: pouches come in a wide range of strengths, usually from around 4mg of nicotine per pouch up to 11mg and beyond. If you’re coming off cigarettes, it’s tempting to reach for the strongest tin on the shelf — don’t. Start low, around 4–6mg, see how you get on, and step up only if you genuinely need to. A too-strong pouch on an empty stomach halfway up a steep pull is a quick route to feeling green, and nobody wants that with two hours still to walk. Light or social smokers should start at the very bottom of the range.

Where they fit in a day on the hills

Practically speaking, this is kit that suits walking rather well. A tin weighs next to nothing, lives happily in a hip-belt pocket, and doesn’t care about rain, wind or cold. The natural moments find themselves: one pouch with the flask at the trig point, another on the long descent when the light’s going and the legs are tired. Because there’s no smoke, you’re not stood apart from the group downwind — you’re just walking. The one bit of planning worth doing is the same as with anything consumable: sort it before you travel, since you won’t find much for sale on the tops between Haworth and Hebden Bridge. Online nicopods specialists carry the full range of brands and strengths delivered to your door, which beats discovering an empty tin in the car park at Penistone Hill.

The honest caveat, which any walking blog worth its salt should give you: nicotine in any form is addictive, these are adult products, and the best outcome of all is quitting nicotine entirely — the NHS quit services are free and genuinely good. But if you’re going to use nicotine on the hills, there’s a strong case that it shouldn’t involve a flame, a battery or anything left behind in the heather.

Back to the moor

Because that’s what this really comes down to. The moors above Haworth have survived a great deal — enclosure, industry, two centuries of literary pilgrims — but dry peat and careless flame is a threat they can’t argue with. Walk up to Top Withens on a clear evening, watch the light move across Wadsworth Moor, and it’s obvious why the small choices matter: what we carry, what we carry out, and what we never light in the first place. See you up there — flask packed, butties wrapped, and nothing smouldering but the sunset.