Bog Myrtle & Peat

Thirty five thousand people passed through the doors of Bog Myrtle and Peat in 2024. I’ve published 117 new posts this year, bringing the all-time total to more than 2,000 articles since the project began in 2010. I know all this because the web host sent me a summary on Christmas Day, and in a bid to boost myself into another year, I read back through a year’s writing and reviewed those pieces which I felt had worked best. Beyond a mixture of fun controversies, opinion pieces and diary entries, I was actually very encouraged to realise that at least thirty articles represented the kind of writing I hoped to produce.

I wanted to share these here, but I set myself the additional challenge of picking six favourites from that final shortlist. These are featured here… in no particular order:

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before (January) – In a small farming community, the same stories circulate every year – but novelty is often over-rated.

Hard Calving (April) – Offering extra care and attention to a problematic cow in the context of cutthroat efficiencies.

Greyface Lambs (May) – Marking the spring lambs, standing knee-deep in the natural rightness of sheep work.

Hello Stranger (May) – Discovering terrifying cave paintings on the wall of an ancient, vulture-infested cave in the mountains of Extremadura.

In the Sea (August) – Wading into the Irish Sea in search of bass, then afterwards a driftwood fire and the moonrise over the Mull of Galloway.

Across the Amu Darya (September) – A moment’s glimpse of a Central Asian river, and all the wild exhilaration of new and unexpected places.

Maybe you’ll disagree with these or offer your own favourites, but I wouldn’t put anything on this blog that I wouldn’t stand by. Either way, these are a pretty good sample of the work that I’m most pleased with – and unsurprisingly, the publishing software behind Bog Myrtle and Peat informs me that these pieces are actually some of the least popular – they’re tiny beside some of the bigger, more barn-storming provocations which arose around the idea of moorland management for grouse shooting, or a National Park in Galloway. These are fun to write and bring hundreds of people onto the site, but they’re very quickly past their sell-by-date and they tend to generate more heat than satisfaction.

I’m tempted to ignore the statistics because this blog has always been a labour of love. Only a small percentage of my output ends up here, and it’s a welcome relief to have somewhere to put the least commercial writing I care most passionately about. But it has been interesting to gauge reactions to my recent attempt to develop a second blog on Substack. Meeting a long-time reader in person over Christmas, he gave me a conspiratorial nudge and said that he wondered when I would start trying “to wring money” out of my work. He was being cheeky and fun, but it did give me pause for thought – because the implication is that I shouldn’t really expect to be paid for being a writer.

Even in the fifteen years that I’ve been writing this blog, the way we value writing has changed enormously. Some of the columns and opinion pieces I write for magazines and papers still refuse to pay any more than they paid in 2009 – as a freelancer, it’s normal to be asked to contribute work for free, even for national newspapers. Large tranches of traditional journalism have been replaced by a kind of search-engine-optimised advertorial which publishers describe as “content”. It’s getting hard to find writing that isn’t somehow involved in the promotion or sale of services or products, and this is often provided to media platforms free of charge – the author is paid by the service provider, not by the platform. This stuff is often rubbish, and it’s not even fun to write – so it’s no surprise that artificial intelligence has been harnessed to produce it for us – and so the downward spiral continues.

I’m lucky that my work gives me freedom to write, and my writing works across all kinds of different platforms. I produce books, stories, essays, articles and comments in all kinds of odd places – and it just about adds up to a living. In opening up the potential for a paid subscription platform at Substack, I’m not looking to replace anything I already do. I’ll still be writing Bog Myrtle and Peat as a completely free-to-access platform (although I need to be more considered about how I use it), but since so many people have offered to support my writing over the years, Substack is an opportunity to enable sponsorship and subscription for those who want to contribute.

I sense my own defensive tone here – but I’m not on my own in this, and I know lots of writers who feel extremely squeezed by the way the system has been made to work. I’ve heard Substack described as “online busking”, and that could mean all kinds of things – some more positive than others… but when you explore the metaphor, I look like the silliest busker in town, because I’ve been busting myself to perform in public for fifteen years without ever throwing down a hat to catch the coins. Every writer I know has experimented with online subscriptions over the last few years. It’s worked for some and others have abandoned it, but I’ve been so resolute in my refusal to engage with the idea that it looks like I actively hate the idea of being paid. So here’s where I throw down a hat, and you’re very welcome to read, dispute and enjoy what’s written here, regardless of whether you’re able to chuck something into it or not!

As Bog Myrtle and Peat approaches its sixteenth birthday, I’d like to thank everybody who reads this blog. I know this project has meant a lot to people over the years, and it’s very humbling to know that my excitements and enthusiasms chime with others. Rest assured that there will be much more to come in 2025 – potentially in some unexpected and refreshing angles…