Messages from the Bog
On the importance of bogs in Ireland, approaching the topic from a historical and cultural, but also an environmental and spiritual angle.
This essay has originally been published on my website back in October 2021 when I suddenly woke up one day and, after many years away from writing and journalism, felt an urge to write about my fascination with bogs. I had an idea of dedicating a small corner of my website to a blog and this was supposed to be its very first post. Alas, the blog has been abandoned and this turned out to be its only post… I now know that the late 2021, a period when I was living in a twilight state, at the peak of C-PTSD, simply wasn’t the right time for me to come back to writing, but this piece of writing has been a stepping stone. Stylistically, it was the nature writing I'm pursuing nowadays, only I didn't know how to crystallise my calling at that time.
The essay has now been updated and given a new life.
Bog, also known as moor, peat(land), marsh(land), fen... These names bear a slight difference in meaning depending on what type of vegetation is prevalent and what country we are talking about, yet they all instantly bring up the same association — that of a barren land, brown and dull, one that is of no use to modern man. One that gives many an urge to transform it into what men can use; maybe a dredged land suitable for agriculture, a new plot for a housing estate, or indeed a building site for yet another shopping centre?
To many passersby, at first glance, the bog looks like a dead landscape. Dark, soggy and wet as far as you can see — our human mind easily connects such occurrences to something unwelcoming, sometimes even sinister. Countless stories about the dangers that lurk in bogs have been made in Ireland and elsewhere, across Celtic, Saxon, Norse, Baltic and Slavic lands. Many a poor child drowned in murky waters of the bogs, hidden beneath knolls of thick, yet treacherous grass that tricked them into expecting a solid ground beneath. Perhaps they were led off the path by a mischievous will-o'-the-wisp1…
Not quite water, not quite land, the bog is an in-between place. A liminal place; a hedge between the worlds. Human mind doesn't do well with uncertainty that fills it with fear and horror of the unknown, and bogs are the very epitome of such uncertainty. One wrong step and instead of landing on an ankle-length patch of heather, you will sink knee-deep into a mucky hole, filled with black, disintegrating mossy substance that thickens around you as you wriggle. Who knows what is beneath this dark, slimy surface? A mere glance at these never-ending plains of the unknown have made many feel uncomfortable, now and in ancient times. Who knows what exactly did our ancestors have in mind, respecting the bog – or perhaps, venerating or pleasing the spirits who inhabited this liminal place – when they laid their offerings into the bog? Bent weapons, intricate cauldrons, buckets of butter; human sacrifices we nowadays unearth as bog bodies2. Shall we ever fully comprehend the true motivation behind these practices, or is it forever lost to our skewed, modern mind?
And yet, the ominous looking bog is anything but dead. In almost total absence of forests in today's Ireland, especially native forests, following centuries of colonial exploitation that started with the Normans and is still ongoing with the British3, it is the bog, alongside the hedges, that have taken over the role of the forests. The role of growth, of supporting life and making it flourish. In today's Ireland, and indeed for centuries before our time, bogs and hedges are the key to the Irish ecosystem, providing home and shelter to the majority of our wildlife.
Since times long forgotten, the people inhabiting what we now call Ireland tried to put the vast peatlands to good use. The soggy land was often tricky for building and living on it, but it provided a key everyday essential – fuel. Cutting peat or turf is an activity that is seen as quintessentially Irish. Older generations will often talk about turf with a tear in their eye and a shaky longing in their voice, recollecting the endless hours spent on the bog cutting and bagging the turf and the endless hours spent by the fireplace, soaking up the peculiar scent of burning, smoldering peat. In old, heavily agrarian Ireland, already largely stripped of her woodlands, turf was the only means of heating one's home and cooking meals. The romantic picture of a kettle hanging over an open fire in a typical Irish cottage is impossible without it being accompanied by the characteristic scent of turf. It has been done for thousands of years and it will be done for thousands more, but the question is how will that usage look like.
The reality is that damaging or destroying peatlands is doing us more harm than good. Namely, bogs are the key to water retention and flood control, and they also store enormous amounts of carbon accumulated over tens of thousands of years. In terms of Ireland, they're the single best carbon sink we have at our disposal. Draining the bogs to convert them to farmland (grazed by sheep into a bleak ecological wasteland) or hideous timber plantations (consisting of non-native conifers planted purely for commercial reasons) and cutting them for turf not only destroys the ecosystem, but also releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In today's world when we even talk about advanced technological solutions to mechanically trap carbon emissions, releasing more carbon is a big red tape. Turf cutting in Ireland is today heavily controlled, after steadily growing into a big commercial endeavour for decades. Despite opposition coming from the turf industry, there's now a distinction being made between large-scale machine cutting and small-scale manual cutting, the latter of course being far less damaging for the environment. Yet any, even the smallest damage means that thousands of years will be needed for the bog to restore itself. It is unlikely turf cutting for personal use will ever completely stop, but every effort should be made to educate the public about sustainability and preservation through degrowth.
I must point out that nothing I've said here is an endorsement of the policies and actions of the Irish Green Party; a party of city environmentalists that prop an upper class government aligned with imperialism. As paradoxical as it is, the Green Party is widely seen as being out of touch with the realities of life and industry in Ireland; virtue signaling, unfit for purpose and incapable of successfully implementing any real changes. This sad situation however is a product of the colonisation of the Irish spirit – and sadly, that is a phenomenon that is noticeable among both politicians and everyday people. In one way or another, colonialism has imposed a stranglehold on each and every person inhabiting these lands, resulting in a worldview that detaches humans from the land and sees the land as nothing but an object to exploit. It's easy to find yourself embroiled in a conversation in which someone will use very harsh words against the Greens while fiercely defending and celebrating turf cutting as an integral part of Irish identity and history. The problem is that they're not celebrating it because of a gentle, grateful, reciprocating relationship with the land that is stewarded as an equal, but because of a sense of ownership, entitlement, reducing the land to physical resources that are here to serve us.
Every Irish person, no matter where in the world you talk to them, will have a spark in their eye when you mention the scent of a turf fire. My hope remains that they will have an even bigger spark in their eyes when you mention the land itself. What if we could raise our children to lighten up when you mention not the scent of the turf fire, but observing the blackbird pecking on hawthorn berries in the hedge?
The endless bogs coloured with patches of purple heather bloom, speckled by the snow white blossom of bog cotton.
Native hawthorns standing in the middle of the fields, short and knobbly, but proud, hosting the fae and safeguarding the Otherworld.
Red-breasted robins singing in the hedges while a large badger swiftly burrows under the roots.
Dewdrops glistering under the first rays of the morning sun, slowly dripping off the cobwebs veiled all over coconut-scented gorse bushes.
Incredibly vivid shades of green stretching for miles and miles, more often than not basking in tiny raindrops and sunshine at the same time, creating rainbows that take your breath away even though you see them almost daily.
It is necessary for turf cutting to stay on a very small scale while recognising that turf is – even though traditional and loved – one of the least efficient fossil fuels, one that emits high levels of carbon dioxide per unit of energy used. It is crucial to embrace that the importance of bogs for biodiversity, flood management and storing carbon comes before the cultural importance of bog cutting. Holding onto one's cultural traditions is indeed tremendously important for one's identity – yet if we let any tradition harm the very environment that gave life to that tradition, what have we actually achieved? By trying not to lose ourselves, we will lose what makes us us.
Seamus Heaney, one of the greatest Irish voices, once wrote of bogs4:
To this day, green, wet corners, flooded wastes, soft rushy bottoms, any place with the invitation of watery ground and tundra vegetation, even glimpsed from a train or a car, possess and immediate and deeply peaceful attraction. It is as if I am betrothed to them, and I believe my betrothal happened one summer evening, thirty years ago, when another boy and myself stripped to the white country skin and bathed in a moss-hole, treading the liver-thick mud, unsettling a smoky muck off the bottom and coming out smeared and weedy and darkened. We dressed again and went home in our wet clothes, smelling of the ground and the standing pool, somehow initiated.
For some who nowadays cut the turf for personal use, this activity is the last proper interaction with the nature they have in their lives. What we as a society and individuals need is to look deep inside ourselves and nurture a mindset of being one with the Nature again, as opposed to owning our natural environment and bending it to our will so we can exploit it. A mindset of being just a small cog in a wheel we don't possess or control; it will turn with or without us, unpredictable, complex, primordial and wild; just like the bog. A mindset of rewilding and restoring the sense of sacred; a mindset of stewardship that will allow us our own initiation into a world beyond supremacy, ownership and commodification.
For it is the land itself, not any activity that stems from using and exploiting that land, that makes the Irish Irish, and indeed any person of any land. We do not claim the land, the land can only ever claim us. This ancient soil still speaks the tongue of the Cailleach – if only one chooses, in a humble search of our essence, to hear and listen.
For examples of related stories, see Will-o'-the-Wisp, Jack-o'-Lantern, ignis fatuus (foolish fire): Legends about fiery fairies, translated and/or edited by Professor D. L. Ashliman, University of Pittsburgh here.
One local bog body, dubbed “Bellaghy boy” has been discovered just a couple of months ago. Coincidentally, it was close to the birth place of the famous Irish author Seamus Heaney who wrote about the bog bodies extensively. See this article in Derry Journal for more information on the “Bellaghy boy” and other historical finds from the Derry area.
I've previously written about the deforestation of Ireland in my essay The ontology of a sunken garden in March 2024.
Heaney, Seamus. Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978.
This is extremely interesting to me because I was unaware of what a bog is, though we have a lost of marshlands in Indian subcontinent but never encountered a bog! It sounds like a sacred place to venerate power of nature because it refuses to have a perfect state of matter that our minds can understand.
Your analysis about the trend of transforming apparent ‘wastelands’ into something profitable is so important because this idea is a remnant of a colonial way of looking at landscapes as inert objects devoid of any spiritual significance which straightforward dejects the indigenous ways of looking at land as sacred. Amitav Gosh talks a lot about it in his book ‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’. I found this to be true with my analysis of the Nilgiris too. Also this also indicates how capitalism is an extension of imperialism and continues to be idealise similar values but with slightly different mechanisms.
This was a great read. It was educational for me, which I think was your goal. Cutting turf is one of my cosy childhood memories, I had never thought of it as an interference with the land. It was, of course. But I was maybe five to ten years old when my family would set off with sandwiches and lucozade under the summer sun, when I would feel useful and part of something as my little boddy shucked and turned, as I glowed under the praise of my parents. My heaps of turf were always the neatest.
In the physical world, I only know the bog in summer, the dry bog, the cut bog. I think it's only in literature that I know the wet muddy land, although it feels as though I have lived there. Perhaps its in my blood, the ancestors and so on.
My childhood was at times very dark, but I loved the land and was lucky my parents chose such a beautiful place to raise me. Other memories are of staring endlessly across the Atlantic, herding cows with my neighbours, playing hide and seek in the fields, jumping on bails of hay, making blackberry jam. I'm from south west Kerry, the Iveragh peninsula, a truly beautiful place. When I go home in adulthood, I find family hard. But the land is always there waiting to cradle me. I wrote a little prose/photo piece the last time I was there which you might like to read: https://honestlywritten.substack.com/p/slan-abhaile