Peat fires burning in cottages across the Highlands are more likely to have been fuelled by Irish peat briquettes than turf cut on the Scottish moors. The Irish Peatland Conservation Council has described as "hypocritical" Scotland's reluctance to cut its own turf in favour of importing it from Ireland.

"Ideally, we would love it if people would stop cutting turf in Ireland as it is not sustainable and it will have to stop at some stage, " said Caroline Hurley, the council's conservation officer.

"I was surprised to hear that they have stopped cutting turf in Scotland and I think that it is a little bit hypocritical if they are importing turf from us and are not cutting their own. However, I would be almost 100% sure that peat exported is cut on a commercial basis and is not used from areas of preservation."

Figures produced by the World Energy Council and the Finlandbased International Peat Society in 1999 . . . the latest year for which statistics are available . . . showed that only 20,000 tonnes of peat were cut for home burning in Scotland.

However, it has been reported that the Scottish have stopped cutting their own turf. Shops and filling stations across the Highlands are now selling Bord na Mona peat briquettes.

Jerry Mulgrew from Glasgow, who runs the biggest Scottish distributor of Irish peat briquettes, said: "I started selling peat from Ireland about 10 years ago and I would have been selling about 30 tonnes a year.

"Now I'm up to 80 tonnes a year, and that has been edging up while fuels like coal have been going down.

The compressed peat is cleaner to use than coal, but I think it's a real shame that no one in Scotland is marketing it to sell like the Irish do."

Concerns have been raised in Ireland over the popularity of Irish briquettes in Scotland and the effect that popularity may have on Irish peatlands.

"If the demand for our peat products from places like Scotland continues to grow, there is a risk that people might exploit preserved bogs, " Caroline Hurley said.

"At the moment, there are people cutting turf in raised bogs in the midlands, even though they are areas of preservation. It has occurred on a site in Kildare where peat has been cut on a commercial scale from an area of preservation."

Meanwhile, over half of the peat sold in British garden centres, including chains such as B&Q and Homebase, comes from Ireland.

It is predicted that an area the size of an Irish county will have been stripped bare by commercial peat extraction within the next decade, creating an environmental crisis in boglands that have taken more than 10,000 years to form.