Tradition, Memory, and the Future of Peatlands

Once upon a time, the burghers of Dumfries would dig and burn peat to keep them warm in the cold of winter. The town had an array of bogs or mosses from which to choose.  The road out to Lockerbie floats on the Lochar Moss, in the midst of which is now located the town dump. The Moss Road, not far west of the town, runs through what was the Mabie Estate, and borders a peat bog, now, to some degree, drained and planted with conifers. The eastern flank of the town too was made defensible by the presence of an expanse of peat bog pushing the access from Annan northwards onto the higher  ground. In an earlier time these were sustainable resources, like the cut and come again magic pudding in the Australian story my Aunt Rose sent me when I was a child. 

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, my family went on caravan holidays from our home in Newry to places in the far south and the west of Ireland, Cork, Kerry, and Mayo. The smell of what we called “turf” fires, burning in the cottages we passed, was one of the fondest of memories that we took home with us. My mother would tell me about the fires in those cottages, that they were never allowed to go out, for all the cooking was done over them. 

Patrick Laurie, writing on his Substack describes, in more recent times, an encounter with  men and women cutting peat in Donegal. He was moved to stop off from his journey to work with them. This prompted him to recall, with obvious nostalgia, his own experiences when a boy with his family in Galloway,  cutting peat for the home fire. He goes on to speak of how he continues to cut peat by hand from the moorland around his farm to feed his own hearth. “I think it’s important to keep the tradition alive.” he says but continues, “I balance that impulse against the growing awareness of environmental damage caused by peat extraction.”

I was at a recent  Crichton Conversation given by  Professor Roger Croft. His subject was planting trees, but bogland and its abuse featured prominently in what he had to say.  He told us that one of the ongoing follies of large scale tree planting in Scotland is that it is often being done over peat bogs. Thus the capture of carbon by the trees is cancelled by the destruction of the bog. Not only is there a  loss of important habitat but carbon that would otherwise be sequestered without the need to plant any trees is squandered.

I cannot comment on the sustainability of turf cutting in the west of Ireland. There it always seemed to me a practice which would have made the subsistence economy I witnessed sixty years ago in that part of the world more bearable. But in Galloway, Patrick Laurie cutting enough peat to keep his own fire burning throughout the winter seems, as he suggests, more like an honouring of a tradition, a tradition that has all but disappeared. A few peats for his own fire, from a cut and come again source, is a minor detail when set against the ravaging, on a large scale, of peat bogs by tree planting, an activity made the more scandalous by the fact that lazy allocation of government grants and a failure to check what is happening is enabling the practice. 

Endnotes

And the Yellow Ale, Substack  Peat Culture  The substack is a recent venture and Patrick’s work may also be found at his blog, Bog Mrtyle and Peat.

The Magic Pudding, by Norman Lindsay   A great read as I remember it!

Crichton Conversation with Professor Roger Crofts   “Roger trained as a geographer and geomorphologist.  He has worked in universities, The Scottish Office, and was the Founder CEO of Scottish Natural Heritage.”