Bog Myrtle & Peat

We used to dig peat for the fire. That work was a major event for my entire family, and it always reminds me of home. Digging peat is partly why I make such strong associations with Galloway as a moorland place, and why I feel such pride in these wide old hills. But I start to see that this work was out of date in the late 1980s, and what I took for an eternal chore was already dead. It was just too easy to heat a home by simpler means, and while my grandfather could not imagine this place without the smell of peat smoke, my parents found it more than possible. I caught the very last glimmers of an old tradition, and even that memory was altered by progress and technical innovation.

The last few years we took peat off the hill, the hard work was done for us by a special implement mounted on the back of a tractor. It mined the peat and spewed out long cylinders of black fuel to dry on the moss. The machine belonged to a man in Kirkpatrick Durham, but if he thought he’d make money doing contract work, he came too late to the party. I don’t know anybody else who still burns peat in Galloway, and the stuff I cut nowadays is only a small revival. I think it’s important to keep the tradition alive, but I balance that against the growing awareness of damage caused by peat extraction.

Now we’ve established that it’s important to protect peat, the public’s response is strangely conflicted and subjective. Aside from a handful of people who dig their own peat, hardly anybody has a personal stake in conversations about peatland. It’s easy to complain about things you don’t do yourself, and in a world where conservation is based on “stopping the bad guys”, peat is a useful campaign tool. So gamekeepers are considered demonic for burning peatlands by people who grow plants in peat compost; foresters are blamed for draining bogs while whisky distilleries are encouraged to add value to their produce with peat smoke. The reality is that peat is damaged in all kinds of ways, but we’re only outraged by certain ones. Some of this is sheer hypocrisy, but it’s also true that peat has only recently become a conservation concern. As we begin to make sense of that realisation, we’re inclined to flit between opinions. The upshot is that while a growing number of people recognise that peat is important, few of us have sufficient knowledge to act with any coherent authority.

In Donegal, I stopped on the road above Pettigo to see peat being dug on the roadside. There were men smoking cigarettes nearby, and I went to see if they wanted a hand. The tractor moved in blundering passes, seeming to trawl across the bog like a plough. These moorlands are very reminiscent of home, although perhaps more like Wigtownshire than my own Stewartry. If you can ignore the strange infestations of rhododendron, you can easily tell yourself you’re standing on a backroad to Mochrum or Kirkcowan. There are even grouse here, in a nation where the birds are famously scarce. I found feathers and roost piles on some of the peats cut two or three days beforehand, and when I spoke to the men on the tractor it was clear that while the birds are nowhere near so common as they were, they’re holding on just fine.

This Irish machine was far more efficient than the one we used in Galloway. Somebody said you could do four days’ work in two hours with a machine like that, and it was easy to see why. Decked out with triple wheels, it was hard to imagine a bog where this tractor could not go. A little rowan tree was growing out from under the bonnet, seeming to suggest that the machine was capable of meeting the natural world halfway in some respects.

I had an entertaining afternoon with those men. I learned that you pay five hundred euros for a plot of peat, and then share the price of the tractorwork. Then it’s on you to turn the peat and dry it using whatever method you choose. Your five hundred euros will give you five hundred bags of peat, which everybody seemed to reckon was “enough”. When I later saw peat stacked inside garages and sheds, it was clear that each year’s harvest is next winter’s fuel, and peat’s only ready to burn when it’s shrivelled down to a wrist’s thickness. These stacks were fifteen feet square and shoulder high. Spiders clattered between the peats. Men were proud of their work.

But these Irish seemed like thin-skinned people. Even as I worked and turned the peat in a cotton shirt, they wore jackets and hats, and the nearby houses billowed with smoke all the time we talked. When I later asked if the midges were bad on the bogs, one of the men said “no, it’s too cold for them now”, despite its being the first week in August. Another man left early when the sun began to sink, complaining of an evening’s chill. I hadn’t even thought to reach for my jumper, and I wondered if these men really needed five hundred bags for a winter, or whether I could deploy my Presbyterian thriftiness to make do with half that number.

I learned a great deal from the peat-diggers, but days later when I drove out to Glencolumbkille on the West coast, I saw that kind of small scale domestic peat extraction writ large. Plots ran out to the far horizon, and people milled around them, even on weekday mornings. I stopped and talked to some of these folk, and I loved their sense of shared purpose. The weather was right for turning peat, so everything else could wait. Some built their peats into small dolmens so the wind could move through them, while others worked with wetter stuff that was only suitable for rolling over. Big stacks were being assembled, and a woman came over to explain how her neighbour’s work was only second rate. “Sure, you shouldn’t need a tarpaulin on your stack”, she sneered and rolled her eyes at such amateurism.

All this wealth of effort and detail played out in stark contrast to the way we’re encouraged to heat our homes in Scotland. Our energy comes from some undisclosed location, arriving down a wire and paid for by an automatic bank transfer. When the prices leap up, we’re horrified to find that we’re many stages removed from something we depend upon. Digging peat for domestic consumption carries an ecological pricetag, but the people who do it are enviably independent of opaque and foul-smelling global systems. The very act of being out to dry and turn fuel when the weather’s right establishes a sense of connectivity with the natural world which is heightened by the cultural accompaniments of knowing that your ancestors did the same.

When I climbed Donegal’s Bluestack Mountains, I was met with expressions of bemusement. Local folk wondered why I had gone to such a difficult and inaccessible place, and I used that response to surmise that there’s a different outdoor culture in Ireland. But when it came to the bogs, I did get a clear sense that people do this work for reasons which go beyond financial compulsion. They want to be there; they enjoy the work and those surroundings. They’re observing something valuable, and my only concern is that of fifteen people who met me with warmth and patience on the roadsides last week, I’d guess that none of them were under fifty years old.

A generational gap killed peat culture in Galloway, long before environmental concerns emerged. Younger folk were not prepared to spend the time on physical labour that their parents had. Reading around similar issues in Ireland, it’s hard to see how a growing awareness of climate change will kill something so deeply engrained in Irish culture. Only a new generation can overturn this ancient tradition, and it seems like the process has already begun.

Picture: Peat drying near Pettigo, Donegal. The tractor in the background is an older model of a far more active and efficient machine which dug these peats – 7/8/22