Formby dunes fire burned 10 hectares, six engines sent

Six fire engines were sent to the sand dunes near Albert Road in Formby on Wednesday evening after a gorse fire took hold in one of the most heavily protected stretches of coast in England. Crews were on scene at 8pm and found a fire already measuring about 300 metres by 300 metres, with beaters and hoses in use. (Merseyside Fire & Rescue Service)

By 10.15pm the service reported that firefighters were working in difficult conditions, with the fire driven by wind and reshaped to 500 metres by 200 metres, with multiple seats of fire in thick gorse and dunes. That footprint is roughly 10 hectares, about fourteen football pitches. A drone was sent up to give crews a view from height, an off-road vehicle was brought in to reach the fire from the beach side, and a fire engine from Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service attended under cross-border mutual aid. The main body of the fire was later put out and crews stayed to check for hot spots.

Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service has not published a cause.

How much bigger this was than last year

The same road produced a dune fire in July 2025, and the difference in scale is the story. On 23 July 2025 crews were alerted at 5.26pm to a grass fire on Albert Road measuring roughly 50 metres by 50 metres. Three engines attended, every seat of fire was out by 6.30pm, and crews left the scene at 6.44pm. (Merseyside Fire & Rescue Service)

Wednesday’s fire covered around forty times that ground and needed twice the engines, a drone and mutual aid from another county.

Why a fire in these dunes matters more than most

The dunes at Formby are not ordinary scrub. They sit inside the Sefton Coast Special Area of Conservation, a 4,591.59 hectare designation made for its dune habitats, including shifting dunes, fixed dunes with herbaceous vegetation and humid dune slacks. The site holds about 163 hectares of shifting dunes and 99 hectares of dunes with creeping willow, which is 43 per cent of the entire English resource of that habitat. It was also selected for its large population of petalwort, the only site chosen for that plant in north-west England. (Joint Nature Conservation Committee)

Sefton Council’s Green Sefton service manages 22 miles of this coastline, describing the dunes and woodland as home to an array of wildlife and one of the best places in the country for nature study. (Sefton Council)

Lighting a fire there is already an offence

This is the part most people do not know. Fires and barbecues are banned outright across Sefton’s coastal and visitor areas under a Public Spaces Protection Order, and Formby is one of the sites named in it. The order prohibits anyone “to light or fuel any open fire nor to use, light or discard any disposable, gas powered or standard charcoal barbecue”. (Coastal and Visitor Areas PSPO 2025)

Breaching it is a criminal offence. On summary conviction the maximum is a fine at level 3 on the standard scale, which is £1,000, and an authorised officer can instead issue a fixed penalty notice. The order was renewed in 2025, having first come into force in July 2022, and runs until mid-2028. More than 60 per cent of people who responded to the consultation backed each of its measures, including the ban on fires and barbecues. (Sefton Council)

The National Trust makes the same request at its own Formby site, asking visitors to protect wildlife “by not lighting fires or BBQs and taking your litter home”. (National Trust)

What it means for you

The heat has not finished. A UK Health Security Agency amber heat-health warning covers Sefton until 9pm on Friday 14 August, and the council has said temperatures were expected in the high 20s and even low 30s across much of the borough during the alert, which began at 9am on Tuesday 11 August. (Sefton Council) Dry gorse in wind is what turned a manageable fire into a six-engine one within a couple of hours.

If you are heading to Formby or Ainsdale this weekend, the practical points are simple. Do not take a barbecue, disposable or otherwise, and do not light anything: it is banned, not merely discouraged. Take glass home rather than leaving it in the dunes. If you see smoke in the dunes, call 999 rather than assuming somebody else has, because access on that stretch is slow and crews had to come in from the beach side on Wednesday.

In the same heat advice the council asks people to swim only where lifeguards are on duty, naming Formby and Ainsdale, and points out that Crosby beach is not a bathing area. (Sefton Council)

For getting there and parking, our roadworks and travel page tracks current closures across the Southport and Formby area, and things to do in Southport covers the coast and the resort in more detail.