By historian Roger Bingham of Ackenthwaite:

The, generally, drier weather of early June was a prime time for villagers around the Kent Estuary to go ‘down t’t mosses’ to dig for peat which, after drying during the summer.

This continued to be used locally right into the 1950s.

In c. 1815 an enclosure act allocated to dwellings in Milnthorpe and Heversham so-called ‘turbary rights’ on 100 peat allotments on Heversham Marsh.

In 1823, four acres of peat moss were advertised for sale at Sampool, on the Levens side of the Kent.

About four days’ work was sufficient to provide winter fuel for an average family.

Once the grass and bracken and the top spongy layer of peat were removed.

The trench was then attacked with a wooden iron-rimmed spade which had an inverted L-shaped handle (not the usual ‘T’) to the blade so that a close cut could be made inside the trench which could reach eight-feet in depth.

The resulting ‘turf’ created was then flung out when it was wheeled away on flat-bottomed broad-wheeled wheelbarrows ‘to be stacked by the women and children’.