Bog Myrtle & Peat

Nearby friends are working on a bog restoration project, unpicking the harm caused by a sitka spruce plantation. The trees were recently felled, leaving the kind of apocalyptic wreckage you’d usually expect to find in the wake of a commercial crop. Beneath the nightmare of brash, branches and splintered tops, the ground itself was deeply scored with ridged and furrowed trenches. This is groundwork that’s often overlooked when plantations mature, but it has a lasting hydrological impact on the soil. 

When foresters brag that their industry is sustainable, they’ll often focus on the amount of carbon stored in trees; even trees which are grown on short rotations to provide a cash crop. They usually fail to recognise the significance of carbon in the soil; carbon that’s released during the trees’ establishment phase, and also after harvesting when the bare or exposed understorey literally bleeds greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Depending upon the carbon content of certain soils, experts believe that short term cash-crop plantations are actually a net contributor to climate change. That’s never more likely to be true than when commercial plantations are placed on areas of deep peat, and it’s why this kind of planting has been placed under extra scrutiny over the last couple of years. 

In the case of my nearby friends, part of their spruce forest was planted by the previous owners on peat that is almost four metres deep. It’s not a large area, but it’s part of something bigger which runs across their boundary onto a neighbouring property. It has taken a huge amount of work to restore this valuable peatland, and some areas have called for extensive landscaping. The old tree stumps have been “flipped” upside down so that their rootplates make a new level surface, and the existing pattern of machine-made corrugations has also been smoothed into flatness again. Learning about these furrows on a recent visit, I discovered that they can amount to a self-perpetuating mechanism of erosion which allows peat to dry and degrade itself. If peat is to stand a chance of healing itself and storing carbon again, the furrows have to be ironed out.

The work itself is fascinating, but during the course of excavations and renovations, the digger bucket has pulled up streaks of grey clay from deep beneath the peat. I thought nothing of this at first, but was staggered to learn that this mixture of soils suggests that before this latest crop of trees, this forest was a bog – and before it was a bog, it was a loch. That took the wind out of my sails. Standing back from the immediate scars left over from the restoration work, I could suddenly see that I was standing on the edge of a single plane of very flat moorland grass, cupped in a series of bays between several low hills. It was breathtakingly easy to imagine this place as a body of open water, crowded down to the shores on all sides with oak and rowan trees, and perhaps the occasional flurry of wild duck inrushing on a winter’s night. It was one of those rare moments when the present falls away, and I could have slapped myself on the forehead at how obvious it was.

It’s not hard to imagine how a loch would gradually fill itself in with moss and vegetation. In time, it would become a bog laying down peat of its own and growing just as loaf of bread would rise beside the oven. It’s reckoned that this process might have been in train for thousands years, slowly proving and expanding upon itself. In this light, it’s almost funny that at some point in a far more recent time, somebody decided to draw a line of ownership across half the bog, building a dyke to mark one side as different from the other. When you realise that this land was all a single body of water, the dyke mocks itself.

But the dyke also serves as a rather pathetic reminder of how crazily we carve up land and manage irrational portions of it in blinkered isolation. Modern land ownership models allowed this single geological entity to be managed by multiple different individuals without placing any obligation upon them to communicate or act collaboratively. I’ve rarely seen the madness of our own system reflected more clearly than it is right here, where an arbitrarily selected segment of this ancient loch had softwood timber scored into it. And the rest of it didn’t. 

The restoration work is still very fresh and the land will take many years to heal and mend itself from here. It will be fascinating to watch that transition, but for me, this place is an extraordinarily compelling reminder to consider what land was before deciding what it should be next. And next to that essentially practical lesson, it also drove home the magical, almost shimmering ephemerality of landscapes which are easily misread as changeless. I’ve often had fun puzzling over the meaning of cup and ring marks which are found all along the Solway coast. I’ve sometimes thought I was almost able to divine some commonality with the people who made those ancient stone carvings. But when you remember that those “silent, vanished races” lived so long ago that their lochs have since become our forests, their half-seen faces slip away into the darkness again.

Picture: streaks of grey clay revealed beneath thousands of years of peat formation