Into the Peatlands E-Book

Robin A. Crawford

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 369

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The peatlands of the Outer Hebrides are half land, half water. Their surface is a glorious tweed woven from tiny, living sphagnums rich in wildlife, but underneath is layer upon layer of dead mosses transforming into the peat. One can, with care, walk out onto them, but stop and you begin to sink into them. For time immemorial the peatlands have been places – for humans at least – of seasonal habitation but not of constant residence. In this book Robin A. Crawford explores the peatlands over the course of the year, explaining how they have come to be and examining how peat has been used from the Bronze Age onwards. In describing the seasonal processes of cutting, drying, stacking, storing and burning he reveals one of the key rhythms of island life, but his study goes well beyond this to include many other aspects, including the wildlife and folklore associated with these lonely, watery places. Widening his gaze to other peatlands in the country, he also reflects on the historical and cultural importance that peat has played, and continues to play – it is still used for fuel in many rural areas and plays an essential role in whisky-making – in the story of Scotland.

Leseprobe

INTO THE PEATLANDS

First published in 2018 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Text and original artwork

copyright © Robin A. Crawford 2018

The moral right of Robin A. Crawford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 78027 559 8

eBook ISBN: 9781788851404

British Library

Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Mark Blackadder

Illustration p. ii: Peatbank Strata with Footprints.

Printed and bound by PNB, Latvia

Dedicated to Pam and Joe Crawford

‘Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes Beholds his own hereditary skies.’

– Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 1 (as translated by John Dryden)

Contents

List of Plates

Introduction: A Leaving

Creation: What Is Peat?

Spring: The Golden Age

Paradise Garden

The Lewis Moor

First Experience

Littoral: Beltane

Summer: The Age of Silver

Cutting the Peat

Peat-cutting Day: Latha buain na monadh

Drying the Peats

Transporting the Peats

Peat Stack: Cruach mòna

Littoral: Marriage

Autumn: The Age of Bronze

Burning the Peat: The Hearth

Whisky

Highland Power

Defeat, Resettlement, New Lands

Littoral: An Age of Warriors

Winter: The Age of Iron

Agriculture and Industry

Banished from Everywhere

The Peatlands that Have Gone

Death, Cremation and Burial

Winter Journey to Rannoch Moor

The Supernatural Moor

Littoral: Snow-blind: A Narrow or Wide View from the Tower?

Spring Again: An Age of Folly or a New Golden Age?

Strathspey Journey

Summer Visit

Ebb and Flow

References

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

List of Plates

1. The bog is half-land, half-water.

2. Another length is added to the corer on Kirkconnel Flow.

3. Paradise Garden.

4. The shieling: A time of happiness and joy.

5. Stag Bakery van.

6. Tairsgeir and spade.

7. Army surplus tents meant a dry lunch at the peat bank.

8. Mary and John at their family’s peat bank.

9. From high above, the Lewis moor looks still.

10. Rùdhan on the east Lewis moor.

11. Between the drying peats is ‘the bird’s road’.

12. A cairn on the moor, Cross, Lewis

13. At peat ‘home time’ all join in.

14. Women knitting whilst carrying creels of peats.

15. Peat Bog, Scotland, c.1808, J.M.W. Turner.

16. Sacks of hand-cut peat await transportation home.

17. Kenny building the third of his peat stacks.

18. A Lewis blackhouse, taigh dubh.

19. Bowmore Distillery, Islay.

20. John Kay’s caricature of Lord Kames.

21. Work with spades continued in Flanders fields.

22. Women working on the Peat Moor, Vincent Van Gogh.

23. Etchings on the window, Croick Church, Sutherland.

24. The Ballachullish goddess.

25. Looking back on Rannoch Moor.

Peat Footprint.

Introduction: A Leaving

Angus Gillies is just one of hundreds of thousands, probably millions, who have emigrated from the peatlands of Scotland. He was born about 1860 on the Hebridean island of Lewis, but like so many before and since he sought a new and better life far away on the other side of the Atlantic. It was an ocean he knew well; twice a day it would either softly wash up the island’s beautiful white sandy beaches sparkling luminously turquoise, or crash mercilessly against the ancient rocky cliffs, threatening destruction – sometimes both.

Angus (Aonghas an Gillies in the Scottish Gaelic his people spoke) grew up in Kirkibost, a township of small, self-sufficient farmsteads or crofts on the Atlantic seaboard, and must have gazed over the ocean all his life. People had been living a similar lifestyle on its edge since at least the Iron Age 3,000 years earlier – and probably for longer – growing a few crops, pasturing their livestock on the island’s vast moors, taking what they could from the sea and shore. But by the mid-nineteenth century that way of life was under threat as never before and, like so many across the Scottish peatlands, islanders were drawn or forced out to the ever-expanding industrial towns and cities of the mainland, to the central Lowlands, London, the Americas and across the British Empire in the hope of a better life. They were victims of a society in flux, experiencing massive social changes following the Industrial Revolution, fleeing poverty, famine, family feud, clearance, dictatorial landlords, oppressive tradition and constricting religion. It was a huge risk to leave for life on the other side of the world, and for some it was fatal, but to stay would have been impossible. So, aged about twenty, he left. Never to return.

More than a century later Marion Laitner, an American, aged ninety, visited Kirkibost. Through family history research she had discovered that she had second, third and fourth cousins living there and as she was reaching the end of her long life she wanted to see the place where her people had originated and the setting for so many of the tales passed down to her. She was welcomed – as so many are – with the generous hospitality of the island and the joy of family reunited, but a further surprise was in store. She was taken out onto the moor where the family had for generations cut the thick, muddy peat to burn as fuel. At a particular spot the top turf was removed for her and there, preserved in the peat, was a footprint – it was the footprint of her father, Angus Gillies.

As she placed her own foot beside the preserved print her cousins explained that on the day before he left his mother had given him a creel and sent Angus out to the bank to collect some peats. Then he was off, like so many of the young islanders. She was desolate at his leaving, but she had to cope the best she could. Life went on.

On her next trip out to the peat bank to collect fuel she discovered one of his footprints there. As the only memento she had of her son she covered the print with turf, and after she died new generations of the family preserved the footprint until that day more than a century later when his daughter returned to her father’s homeland.

* * *

Angus’s footprint is not the only one out on the moor. There are prints of other Atlantic emigrants, not always man-made, like those of the white-fronted goose, which leaves the moorlands of the islands for Greenland each spring, or the rasping corncrake, which heads back to Africa in the autumn.

Alongside these are the more recent human footprints preserved at the foot of most worked banks where people in the north and west of Scotland still cut peat for fuel. Among those at the foot of many a peat bank are mine. It has been my passion to try to understand what it is about peat that makes it such a special ingredient in the making of Scotland.

My journey began when I married Angie, who grew up on Lewis. Since then we have returned most years and I have grown fond of the island and its people. I have always been fascinated by built structures in the Scottish landscape – standing stones, subterranean souterrains, cairns, icehouses, water towers, sheep fanks, hydro-electric dams, Roman walls. On Lewis, the peat stacks and cut peat banks are an integral part of the island’s culture. Layers of peat slabs, layers of history.

The peat itself is built on its own history, ever changing but still the same. So is the peat stack. It is in a constant state of metamorphosis. From its late summertime construction, slabs are removed daily until it has disappeared, leaving only a dark peaty crumble shadow of its former self. In not a few cases in the peatlands that place has been where the stack has stood for generations, with the people constructing it changing but the family, the home, remaining constant – each daughter and son McLeod, upon NicLeod, upon Mcleod. Come spring and the process of resurrection begins again. In the short months between May and early August the peat is cut, dried, transported and stacked before the long, claustrophobic peatland winter begins.

Peat is a fuel – created by water, dried into a solid, turned into a gas alchemically – but it is also a preserver, an organic time machine. It hasn’t only conserved Angus’s footprint but also the microscopic pollen grains from millennia ago which were captured in the peat’s formation. They can tell us about ancient people’s first felling of trees to create agricultural land.

Peat is burnt and turns to ash in the hearth, but miraculously it holds within itself the ashen fallout from Icelandic volcanoes cooked in the belly of the earth, then carried south on the wind; ash from the burning of the forests on Lewis by the Vikings; ash from the peat set alight on Lochar Moss by a spark from a nineteenth-century steam locomotive; ash from Russian peat-fired power stations; or – coming full circle – ash from peat fires raging uncontrollably in Indonesia caused by farmers slashing and burning forest land to feed an ever growing world population.

No less important, it is one of the key ingredients in the making of Scotland’s most famous of exports – whisky.

The peatlands themselves are half land, half water. The surface is of living vegetation, but underneath is layer upon layer of dead mosses. One can, with care, walk out into them, but stop and you begin to sink. That has made them places – for humans at least – of seasonal habitation rather than permanent residence. They are transitional places. You journey onto or over them. This book is made up of many of these journeys throughout the year.

The transformations on the peatlands are one of their remarkable characteristics. In the boggy pools, tadpoles turn into frogs; on the heather moors, caterpillars into butterflies; at the shielings, adolescents into adults. To survive on the peatlands, the people have to adapt. Traditionally, crofters are agriculturalists, sheep and cattle farmers, fishers, weavers, sometimes soldiers, singers, storytellers, preachers – or today they are delivery drivers, small business owners, tour guides, vloggers. They have also had to be pastoralists, hunters and gatherers as well.

The moor and peat-cutting have been integral to people’s ability to live here. The divide of the year between permanent homestead and temporary summer residence on the moor at the shieling is a link to an ancient transhumance culture that is growing ever weaker, but still exists. One of my aims is to record that ancient way of life whilst the living threads of it still exist.

The peatlands are amazing places rich in wildlife and unique mosses and specialist plants found nowhere else. There is huge concern among naturalists and environmentalists about the future of this special landscape, and the hope is that the moor’s ability to capture carbons from the atmosphere offers a partial solution to the centuries of human pollution that have contributed to global warming.

It did, though, become clear to me early on in my journey that of all the amazing creatures that live on or by the peatlands there is one that is almost ignored or dismissed – humans. The people of the peatlands are, like all societies that fringe mainstream global culture, most seriously under threat. After all, my wife and her family, like so many others, left the peatlands and it is highly unlikely that any of them will ever return permanently. As the flow of people drain out of the Highlands and Islands I follow their paths and discover other places where peatlands once existed and find peat-cutting, bogs and mosses still flickering in the fringes of modern Lowland Scotland.

The more I thought about this landscape, the more I envisaged the layers of peat like words and sentences on the page, forming stories of days and weeks; the paragraphs and chapters built up like banks of cut peat running across the moor to months and seasons, until the whole book spread across the full year. This story, going down through the different levels of experience, brought to my mind Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the constant transformations of gods and people into other shapes and forms are set within the Ages of Man – from the Golden Age of paradise and innocence to the cruel Age of Iron, war and death. The year I wrote this book, 2017, marked the 2,000th anniversary of Ovid’s death. In that time 2 metres of peat have formed. And what of this and coming ages? What will it bring – an Age of Folly or a new Golden Age?

Creation: What Is Peat?

‘After leaving the wood the road enters the moor, and is difficult to follow sometimes. The whole aspect of the scene changes. From the corn field and hay meadow you enter at once into a region of moor and peat. You seem to cross the threshold of civilisation, and are transported into a region which bears no impress of the hand of man, and undisturbed by any noisy device or busy handiwork, spreads its fresh beauties before you in all the attraction of nature.’

Peatlands are not dry land. Neither are they wetlands. They are different.

Difference has not always been – and sadly is often still not – appreciated, whether that is a natural habitat, like the bog – the word ‘bog’ has its origin in the Gaelic word bogach – or the people who live on or by it. The idea expressed in the passage above that you ‘cross the threshold of civilisation’ by entering the moor has led not only to ‘uncivilised’ behaviour toward this different land but also to the people of that land – ‘heathens’ supposedly come from the heath.

In early spring I am standing on Kirkconnel Flow in the far southwest of Scotland. Peat-brown water covers the mosses and grasses on which I am walking but, having stopped, it is gradually flooding over my wellies. I am steadily sinking into the ground.

Nearby on 16 November 1771 part of Solway Moss on the Scottish/English border could absorb no more water and ‘erupted’, or suffered a ‘bog burst’. Having reached saturation point, and with virtually nothing tethering it to the land underneath, part of it simply slid away. It became a floating island of peat moving down a gentle slope for a couple of days until it finally formed an adjunct to its old self, which was left between 10 and 30 feet lower than previously.

In Peat: Its Use and Manufacture (1907), authors Frederick Gissing and Philip Björling suggest that ‘peat’ first came into common usage in English following reports of this event, the word previously having been used only in Scotland and northern England, whilst ‘turf’ was used in the south and Ireland. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology suggests the origin is Celtic, while the Collins English Dictionary suggests: ‘C14: Anglo-Latin peta, perhaps from Celtic; compare Welsh peth thing’.

Whilst the natives of central and southern Scotland and latterly the English simply knew it as ‘peat’, the Gaels had a whole lexicon for describing its differing natures, textures and uses. It could be a material for burning in the hearth, or a watery mire; sometimes it was the summer pasture of cattle, at other times the pit from which a sinner’s soul could only be rescued by the Word of God.

Whatever the name, the same scientific principles for understanding what a bog is apply in every language. Bogs are composed of waterlogged peat created by sphagnum mosses. The structure of these plants acts like a sponge, retaining rainfall and making it difficult for other vegetation to grow, for, unlike other plants, sphagnums need very little nitrogen or minerals to survive. They create a paradise for themselves but one which forms from layer upon layer of decaying mosses. This gradually turns into peat at the very slow rate of about one millimetre per annum. These self-perpetuating conditions are so favourable to the mosses and so unfavourable to normal soil being formed – there are only minute amounts of decaying plant debris for worms, fungi and chemicals to feed on – that it allows for virtually no other plants to grow.

Studies indicate that most bog development began 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, but some are considerably older at 9,000 to 15,000 years. How deep a peat bog is can be extremely variable, with around 1 to 3 metres being the average for blanket bogs, and raised bogs around 5 metres, but it is generally accepted that a bog needs to be a minimum of a half-metre deep. The planning permission for small-scale commercial peat extraction at Tomintoul in the Cairngorms specifies that cutting must stop at this depth to allow the bog to stand a chance of recovery.

Cool, wet and, usually, oceanic climates are ideal for the formation of peat bogs, which explains why in Scotland 13 per cent of the land area (approximately one million hectares) is covered in bog. This is predominantly in the north and west of the country, but there are also significant areas in the eastern uplands too. There are massive peat bogs at this latitude from Russia through to Canada and in northern Europe, particularly around the Baltic, but peat is also found in warmer, wet climates under jungles in Africa and Indonesia.

Raised bogs are predominantly Lowland; blanket bogs, Highland. In a raised bog poor drainage encourages the growth of layer upon layer of sphagnum, which can absorb eight times its own weight in water. As the layers grow, the surface of the bog rises and rises, often forming a dome, swollen up like a pregnant belly. These Lowland bogs suffered in the eighteenth century as agricultural improvement began to be introduced; they were drained to create farmland as the Industrial Revolution saw population growth.

Kirkconnel Flow near Dumfries and Flanders Moss are examples of Lowland raised bogs, while Rannoch Moor in the West Highlands and the Lewis moors in the Outer Hebrides are typical blanket bogs. Local subtleties of geography make for no hard and fast rules for where bogs are created or even the types of bog plants growing in them, but what is clear is that bogs need poorly drained land in which to form, with the amount of water going into the bog exceeding the amount of water escaping. Given Scotland’s climate, this can be at high, as well as at low, altitude, with wet enough conditions in troughs high up between peaks being as conducive to sphagnum mosses as they are across the vast flat plain of the Caithness and Sutherland Flow country.

* * *

Kirkconnel Flow is typical of many raised bogs. It is 98 per cent water and 2 per cent organic matter. The major vegetation is sphagnum moss and cotton grass. Formed 10,000 years ago, it would have grown from pits and depressions left after the last glaciers retreated. As the pits filled with vegetal matter, the sphagnum mosses grew and layer upon layer gradually separated themselves from the land and water around and beneath them, and became almost entirely dependent on rain for nutrients. This type of growth is called ‘cloud fed’ or ombrotrophic. It is a self-contained hydrological unit, enclosed by hills and outcrops, with very low quantities of nutrients for vegetation to grow except above it. The lagg fen plants and trees growing round the bog’s fringes take most of the inflowing nutrients for themselves, so you have this contrast of huge solid trunks of Caledonian pines and silver birches surrounding a moor made up of tiny, delicate waterlogged mosses.

As my wellies sink further into the peaty water, I take a look around me. It’s mid-morning and we are suitably kitted out in waterproofs and wellies, heading into Kirkonnel Flow. In the lagg fen birch trees fringe the bog and a willow warbler is invisible but for its song, which starts with a high note then descends as it progresses. Two buzzards wheel overhead, gliding, one in wide circles, the other tighter, but with an amazing gracefulness. A roe deer stands motionless in the woods fringing the bog. Cabbage white butterflies dance drunk on the pale spring sun. In contrast, the talk is of black ravens, appropriate in this transitional place that is neither water nor firm land. In so many legends they are the messengers between worlds.

My friend Dave had invited me to join this group led by his colleague, Dr Lauren Parry of Glasgow University, to take some core samples from this peat bog near Dumfries. From these cores, palynology, the study of pollen samples, reveals a hidden world that is both biological and historical.

One of the group, Michael, asks, ‘Have you smelled a young raven’s feathers? They smell of brimstone and fire!’ (Unknown to us we are about to hear of a geological Hades very soon.)

I think of Tollund man, a body found in a Danish bog, a sacrificial victim, and his watery transition to another world.

Michael is going to help ring the young ravens in their nest, but when asked where will not divulge the location – they are still in peril from farmers and gamekeepers.

Out on the Flow the flimsy coring tool used by Dr Parry to dig down into the bog is like a thin spade attached to a metal tent pole. It is of Russian design – the Soviets carried out a large amount of research on their huge peat reserves when isolation and Cold War politics forced them to look within their own lands for fuel and warmth. It is thrust down into the moss, then rotated to extract longitudinal samples of peat, then retrieved. Different depths are reached by the simple addition of another metre of tent-pole shaft.

The blade of the corer slips smoothly into the flesh of the bog down about 30 cm through the living top 20 cm or so of the bog, the acrotelm, and into the start of the catotelm, the layers of dead plant material. Here we are not only looking at distance in terms of centimetres but also in terms of time: this first core goes back about 150 years. Organic material tends to decay quicker in this level because it is more exposed to the atmosphere than in the deeper layers, where oxygen is absent. In it can be found evidence of man’s activity – fly ash rich in carbon from industrial processes spewed from factory chimneys and coal- (and peat-) powered fire stations. The bog’s ability to store this carbon for longer even than tropical rainforests interests environmentalists, though it is unable to hold quite as much. ‘Carbon capture’ is a buzzword in current moorland regeneration schemes.

Dr Parry shows us a chart showing tephra deposits found in samples similar to this core of peat, highlighting the slow but rising growth of fallout pollution in the atmosphere caused by industrialisation since 1850, then the rapid increase from the 1950s to 1979, then the subsequent decline. Individual man-made incidents, such as the sudden increase in radioactive particles following the Chernobyl nuclear accident, sit alongside strata showing natural disasters like volcanic eruptions – traces of the eruption of the Hekla volcano on Iceland in 950 BCE have been found in many Scottish peat bogs. After its eruption again in 1104 Cistercian monks, who a few years later settled at nearby Dundrennan Abbey, described the volcano as ‘the gateway to Hell’, a fiery opposite to the wet passage to the underworld of the bog people.

Another length of pole is added to the corer, down goes the blade; the deeper it plunges, the further back in time we travel. Evidence of volcanic ash from earlier eruptions has been uncovered and, perhaps surprisingly, lead particles plumbed into the depths of a Scottish bog beyond Hadrian’s Wall during the Roman period – think of all those pipes needed to supply water to their baths. Under the bog, too, lies a network of channels and rivulets formed by uneven compression of the decaying peat over the centuries. While proxies such as pollutants, volcanic ash and pollens can tell us what was happening in the atmosphere or growing in and around the bog at different times, the peat can also reveal subtler environmental changes. An increase in sea salt in an inland peat core suggests a period of stormier weather, where winds carry spray far inland.

The weight of accumulation of deteriorating sphagnum means that after the first 1,000 or so years the age represented by a centimetre of core levels off. The red colour of the core comes from the cotton grass and sphagnum. Changes in colour or tone can result from different types of sphagnum or cotton grass being more prevalent at different periods, due to environmental changes favouring a particular sub-species.

Add another pole and deeper down in the third core are the remains of tiny testate amoebae preserved in the peat. Looking through a x40 magnification microscope you would see their hard shells, which they would have constructed using particles from surrounding vegetal material. Scientists can tell from these shells which plants were growing in the bog at this time and thus determine whether it was a wet, dry or intermediate period.

On our second last core, taken at about 6 metres, there is a birch root. It is common to most peat bogs that birch trees were growing just before the bog was formed. There is no clear or agreed reason for this, but it has been suggested that intervention by man in the felling of these birches was a major factor. On Shetland when this level is reached during domestic cutting, specially sharp tools have to be used and these slabs of peats are known as ‘widdys’.

Two curlews fly overhead, their excited call a fanfare for the wobbling, swaying insertion and extraction of the final core sample – about 7 metres of thin metal rod, bending, like a curlew’s beak.

Then, as if by some kind of magical process, this preposterous, low-tech time machine, awkward and gangly, is extracted and to our astonishment the core has a tiny piece of peat at the very top and then all is smooth grey clay. The contrast with the rich browns, reds and fibrous texture of the peat is stark. We have reached the edge of the last Ice Age. There is no vegetation to be seen in the sample, just the stark post-glacial sediments, layers scraped off old rock and laid down in this forbidding world. Where glaciation stops, scientists can tell from cores taken in the Greenland ice that temperature rises were very sudden; it probably took less than a decade for an increase of about 6 to 8 degrees Celsius. The clay, silt and sand is a colourless grey because conditions were so harsh that they didn’t initially allow organic matter to grow. The change from no organic strata in the Ice Age to the present inter-glacial of peat and plant matter is very sudden.

Liverworts and mosses, still major plants of the bog, are amongst the first species to grow. Over the next period a lake is formed and what grows there fluctuates before a layer of marl is formed from calcium carbonate, suggesting a period of warmth; the lake waters would be clear and blue at this time. There then follow strata where the lighter marl fluctuates with lines of peat and this presages the death of the lake over many years and the laying down of peat as water levels drop and the bog is formed, again indicative of a change to a drying climate. It is this peat bog, perhaps formed 10,000 years ago, that we see today. The fanfare of the curlews had a purpose – we all feel that we have experienced something special, a sense of wonder that we have been able to travel so far back in time.

Our peat samples are laid in pieces of roof guttering, labelled and covered in cling film in preparation for analysis in a laboratory where the business of pollen extraction will take place. Once there, each core is cleaned and treated with chemicals to extract pollen. The second last core spans a period from the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age, from c.11,000 years ago) to the start of Neolithic (New Stone Age, c.7,000 years ago). Every centimetre of this core equates to about twenty to thirty years. A scalpel is used to extract a few millimetres of peat which alone may contain thousands of pollen grains. This subsample is mixed with chemicals to enable the pollen to be studied under a microscope.

Individual pollen grains are identified to work out what plants were growing at that time in the bog and, by the volume of pollen, how abundant each species was. In this case birch is identified and there are hundreds of them. A pollen percentage diagram is produced that shows in graphic form how changes in the vegetation take place over time – different plant groups and different plant species ebbing and flowing. A sample from 6,000 years ago will reveal birch, oak, alder, elm, sedges and some grasses, indicating untouched forest.

Tree pollen travels further than herb pollen, so the sedges indicate bog surrounded by trees with some grasses. Further up the core there is an increase in alder and oak, which means the forest was closing in. The alder likes wet ground, so it was probably right at the edge of the bog, dropping its pollen onto it and causing a decline in the sedges in that area, whilst out on the bog sedges flourished. The trees that like drier ground – oak and elm – were growing on the slopes around the bog.

In the early Neolithic, elm trees across northern Europe suddenly died out. There are many suggested reasons, but elm occupies fertile ground, which is very suitable for farming and, combined with the increase in cereal pollen grains, it may be that the two are linked to Neolithic agriculture.

This seems to suggest that in some cases at least early farmers were the creators of some bogs. The cores show that birch once flourished before the peat was formed and on the surface of the flow they are seeding again. Late twentieth-century government policy was to remove trees from the flow and restrict their growth to the perimeter lagg fen, their thirsty roots devouring the watery soup of the bog, photosynthesising it away into oxygen, drying it out. Nature, though, is no respecter of governments and the top of the flow is again speckled with birch and pine saplings. Some of our fellow corers are quick to pull up these invaders – they are the ‘wrong’ kind of nature.

‘Caledonian pines are not a native species,’ rather surprisingly to my ear, exclaims one, an insight into the debates and many attitudes that populate the complex world of conservation.

Peat Spades.

Paradise Garden

Humans have for millennia imagined, quested for, aspired to, prayed for and attempted to create an ideal world, a heaven on earth, paradise. It might be an oasis in the desert, a temperate valley in the icy mountains or a garden in the city. What are the elements of this desired place? It is unusual, set apart from the everyday; it is enclosed, protected by an outer barrier; special knowledge is needed to enter and navigate; water is key. Different rules apply there. A raised bog may not be a human paradise, but to the plants, animals, birds and insects that live there it is.

Kirkconnel Flow is such a paradise. In dry technical language it is a low-altitude estuarine moss dominated by an abundance of key peatforming species, but to the senses it is a rich jewel set in the rolling Galloway landscape whose colours and textures transform through the seasons of the year as a precious stone held up to the light. Its domed surface, a swollen belly pregnant with life, is covered with a deep cloth woven by the loom of nature out of multicoloured, multi-textured mosses and sphagnums – Golden Bog-moss ranging from green to chestnut to bright orange, or Austin’s Bog-moss hummocked in brown clumps 50 cm tall. Mixed in are Eriophorum sedge cotton grasses such as bog cotton, whose fluffy white buds spot and wave in the wind like a cheerleader’s pom-poms. There are sweeps of common heather, which brush alongside ericaceous mixtures and some Molinias such as purple moor-grass. Other species present, to a greater or lesser degree, are deer grass, cross-leaved heath, liverworts, delicate spring flowers (which turn to fruit on juicy crowberries), glossy bearberries, red cranberries, bog asphodel, Verdigris and yellow lichens, bog rosemary and the less than heavenly (and slightly distastefully named) ‘drowned kittens’, which grows fluffily in the wetter areas at the edge of the bog. The mosses and liverworts are bryophytes, the most ancient of land plants and the initial colonisers after the ice had retreated. They are so adaptable that they number almost 1,000 sub-species and can be found in many of Scotland’s natural habitats, from woodland to mountain extremes, making up a staggering 5 per cent of the planet’s total number of bryophytes. They reproduce in two ways: either sexually (very rarely) through spores in a ‘sporophyte’ stem which disperses through water, or through a cloning-type ‘vegetative reproduction’ of parent material. Due to their sensitivity to any drying-out of the bog, species like Golden Bog-moss and Austin’s Bog-moss are good indicators of a bog’s health.

The low nutrient levels force some plants to adapt to conditions using alternative methods to gain vital nitrogen, in the case of Common bladderwort by ‘eating’ insects. Suited to bogs by having roots which do not need to be attached to soil, it has developed a floating bladder on its leaves which has a flap allowing crustaceans and insects to enter, but never leave, the rotting corpse providing their nutrition. The jewel-like round-leafed sundews are beautiful when discovered but not so for all – perhaps the most well-known insect eater on the bog, it is most similar to the notorious Venus flytrap, with its sticky hairs attracting flies and then gradually closing on the struggling prey. After having extracted all the chemical nutrients it needs, the sundew opens again and the husk of the fly is blown away on the wind. Common butterwort also has sticky hairs at its centre, which trap flies caught in its inward curling leaves. Not so paradisal for all, then.

The sundews flourish because these Lowland bogs are particularly rich in insect life, with many species being discovered there – pulsating orange-bodied damselflies on Bankhead Moss or violet beetles at Black Moss. The pondskaters and waterboatmen of the Red Moss of Balerno row on top of or dive into its peaty pools. These two travellers between worlds are joined in the littoral by others who inhabit both land and water – newts, toads and frogs, whose jellied spawn quivers in the springtime breezes like a quaking mire and magically metamorphoses from egg to tadpole to froglet in the soupy broth of bog. Within the transient world of these mosses other creatures are transformed – squat caterpillars crunching on purple moor-grass turn into peat brown, orange-spotted Scotch Argus or the delicate subtleness of Large Heath butterflies; those on the bog myrtle of the central and western Highlands bloom into the exquisite rareness of the Rannoch Brindled Beauty moth. Larvae become classical-sounding nymphs, then turn into medieval damsel- and dragonflies in the boggy moats to the north of the turf wall built across the slim waist of Caledonia by Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius.

A couplet showing traditional knowledge which has a scientific basis of bog formation begins a letter written in 1865 to the local newspaper protesting about the planned draining of Lochar Moss in Dumfries for agricultural land:

First a wood, then a sea, Now a moss, and aye will be!

As a whilom ‘moss-cheeper’ – as you smart town gamins were wont to term me . . . you must allow me to enter my protest against this threatened iconoclastic desecration – the reclamation of Lochar Moss . . . In the event of a catastrophe so lamentable as the cultivation of the Moss, what would become of the adders, the wild-ducks, the ‘whaups’ [Scots: curlew], the stank-hens [Scots: moorhen], the ‘Lang-necket herons,’ the hares, ‘rats and mice, and such small deer,’ the indigenous denizens of the Moss?

Look at the valuable additions to our history . . . which are disentombed from the moss every year – flint, Celts, Roman weapons . . .

To him, the Moss is not just a place that connects him to his ancestors, he and the people who live by it are so interwoven with its nature that they themselves are known by the townies of Dumfries as ‘moss-cheepers’ – meadow pipits and reed buntings – or ‘Green Johns’. He continues:

Yet the very mention of Lochar Moss awakes a train of old and dear recollections. Though ‘the place which knew us once knows us no longer,’ yet it still occupies a niche in the temple of memory and the mind, many a time and oft, goes back to the days ‘when my old hat was new’ . . .

The moss is a storehouse of memories, a place of innocence where its strange and different nature precluded its intrusion; a place treasured by children for play – where adults, when they intruded, did so briefly – bird hunters and berry gatherers in the youth of the world.

Our Lochar correspondent mentions some of the mammals to be found on the Moss – hares, rats, mice and other ‘small deer’. Also to be found grazing its rich surface would be geese and wildfowl, fallow and red deer, wild sheep and goats, and probably cattle too. Remains of all have been found preserved in Scotland’s peaty bogs.

As human hunters and gatherers began to turn more and more to settled agriculture in the Neolithic period about 6,000 years ago, the relationship with the bogs, moors and mosses began to change. The move was not a sudden one – the human is a walking creature and, like the seasons, we traverse the globe, moving from place to place, environment to environment, as best meets our needs at the time.

Today we are still restless creatures, our footprints measured in carbon.

The Lewis Moor

In the oceanic climate of north-western Europe the seasons may be wet, but except at high altitude they are relatively mild – if infrequently hot. This dampness, which creates the bogs and allows them to flourish, discourages settlement and allows for habitation only on the fringes, or as a summer residence. These moors are almost all blanket bogs, a different environment from the Lowland raised bogs and mosses like Kirkconnel Flow. The one I know best is the moor that covers the north tip of the island of Lewis, itself the most northerly of the Western Isles.

The quiet and calm of air travel allows for a different view; height and distance give a wider perspective. At 36,000 feet over the North Lewis moor on a flight from Reykjavik to Edinburgh the only suggestion of movement in this vast panorama comes from waves breaking on a beach. There is no distracting detail, no hectoring by plover, lapwing, skua or biting wind, or (very occasional) overheating sun from above. Nor is there the shock of walking on this moor only to find myself suddenly sinking, then frantically stumbling to set foot on solid ground again, with the realisation that I have five hours’ more walking to do with wet, boggy feet. No, from above all is calm, dry, gently throbbing, unworldly. The relentless waves thud and crumple silently on the shore below, line after line creating grain after grain of sand; they are the shuttle, the strands of seaweed, the threads on a silent weaver’s loom.

Other lines are being laid down, imperceptibly. From a height of years you could look back and see the peat forming, millimetre by millimetre, year by year. Like flotsam washed up on the shore and gradually covered by sand, the sphagnum takes into itself the history of the atoms that wash up on its surface in all their myriad molecular diversity. Gradations of years see news become history, history turn into ancient history, then pre-history in its peaty strata: last summer’s lost tweed cap; nuclear fallout from Chernobyl; a drained beer bottle thrust into the wet peat bank at the end of a day’s cutting; the carcass of a lost sheep; a Bronze Age axe used to fell the trees that allowed the peat to originally form. But this strata is a mere fringe on the cloth that covers this earth. The rock below has a deeper strata: pink Torridonian sandstone blushes at its own youth compared to the ancient Lewisian gneiss, the bedrock of this island that occasionally breaks through the moor or is exposed by cutters under the peat. Yet back on Iceland even the Torridonian rock would seem old, as the continental plates of Europe and America grind apart and cast up, in quaking volcanic cataclysms, land younger than this peat.

For now, all remains cartographically still – but for that white line of waves breaking along the mile and a half of sandy beach at Tolsta. It is, after all, the Sabbath.

* * *

Under the peat, the bituminous oils are moving. Having retreated before the winter’s chill, they have joined that secret underground blossoming, invisible beneath the unchanging sphagnum, the season-less lichens, that heralds spring. We are on the threshold of the seasons.

Glacial coldness still whips across the North Atlantic. Inside the traditional taigh dubh, the island’s blackhouses, where humans and cattle used to share their winters on Lewis, both would be sensing the change – the last two weeks of winter and the first two weeks of spring, faoilteach, are welcomed hospitably.

The beasts would be straining against the bacan, the tether stake built into their stall. As winter progressed, the point to which they were tethered had to be raised as, like some kind of super-speed peat, the strata of their dung built up the floor level higher and higher. All inside are eager to be out: the crofter to be digging up the dung and spreading it on the land to fertilise the poor soil before sowing this year’s crop; the women and children anticipating the happier, more relaxed mainly man-free days of summer pasturing on the moor; the starving beasts slavering for tender new shoots; the youths looking forward to courting and flirtations at the shielings.

For the island culture was until recently a life divided between a winter and a summer home. The ancient transhumance way of life was lived – part agriculturist, part pastoralist, part hunter-gatherer. The contribution of all was needed in a society based in small townships consisting of family units which subsistence farmed and relied on communal assistance. Their lives were lived half the year in smallholdings or crofts, dividing their time between small-scale arable agriculture, growing cereal crops (oats, some wheat, ‘clover’ grass for cattle feed) and vegetables (carrots and turnips, and later potatoes), or raising a few cattle, goats and sheep, with perhaps a rare horse – the Lewis pony (a breed now extinct) – and some poultry, a little inshore fishing and periods spent working in obligation – obligation to the tacksmen who sub-rented land to the crofter from the landowner, who was often their kinsman or clan chief.

In some times past this obligation would take the form of fighting for the clan chief or for those to whom he owed obligation, such as the Lord of the Isles or the King – or would-be king – of Scots. Obligated but also independent, or as Jessie Kesson describes crofters and their community:

. . . bold whitewashed houses, their windows searching the ocean, like their inhabitants, with an eye always on the sea; being dependent