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The Battle Over Irish Bogs

By Awake! correspondent in Ireland

“IF SOMETHING isn’t done, and quickly, a unique part of the world’s living heritage could be lost for ever.” So said British writer Dr. David Bellamy. What heritage did he have in mind? Ireland’s bogs, or peat lands.​—Bellamy’s Ireland—​The Wild Boglands.

Not everyone in Ireland sees the boglands as a heritage. In the past, says writer Michael Viney, “the bog was synonymous with hardship and the poorest way of life.” Today, according to the IPCC (Irish Peatland Conservation Council), many think that all bogs should be “dug up, drained and changed into something dry and more ‘useful.’” Since digging up and draining bogland produces valuable fuel and leaves behind good agricultural land, why are conservationists concerned? Because they view the boglands as “unique wetland ecosystems.”

Two main bogland types are under threat. One is called raised bog, and the other, blanket bog. Blanket bogs, according to Dr. David Bellamy, “swathe the wet west [and other wet, mountainous areas] with a living blanket, the like of which is seen nowhere else on earth.” What exactly are these two types of bog? Are they really anything more than squelchy, treacherous places from which to dig winter fuel? Must they all go up in smoke?

Raised Bogs and Blanket Bogs

Bogs are huge masses of peat with a living cover of vegetation made up of mosses, heathers, sedges, and flowers. Raised bogs, they say, started to grow thousands of years ago in places like shallow lakes. Vegetation died and sank to the bottom, where it slowly decayed to form peat. These deposits of decaying plants piled up, layer upon layer, until eventually they filled the lake. Some deposits grew to 40 feet [12 m] deep.

Bog mosses colonized the soggy mass that rose out of the lakes and acted like sponges, keeping the bog surface saturated with water. Great hummocks of these bog mosses spread upward and outward and produced amazing dome-shaped raised bogs. “The cupola of a raised bog,” says David Bellamy, “is in effect a gigantic drop of water held together by a matrix of dead, partly decayed plant remains, held intact by a living skin of peat.”

Blanket bogs, on the other hand, did not need lakes in order to grow. They got all the water they needed from persistent rainfall in waterlogged parts of the country​—places where the rain falls at least 235 days each year and produces more than 50 inches [120 cm] annual rainfall. David Bellamy says that blanket bog, which can be 20 feet [6 m] deep, is a giant, “inefficient compost heap . . . super-saturated with water.”

Below the surface, then, bogland is made up of layers of vegetation in varying stages of decomposition. Near the top, you can clearly see the remains of dead plants in the soft brown peat. At the bottom these have decayed into a much darker, denser peat that feels almost like putty.

This might sound bleak and unappealing. But boglands, besides being vast reservoirs of fuel, have a beauty all their own. Michael Viney describes the blanket bog in the west of Ireland as wrapped around the mountains like a great brown rug wrapped around the knees of an old man. He goes on: “If you look closer into the rug, you find it woven of rich fabrics​—velvety mosses of black and bottle-green, brocaded lichens in gold and rose, filigree trimmings of grey-green lace.”​—The IPCC Guide to Irish Peatlands.

This wet wonderland is what conservationists want to preserve. Bogland is home to myriads of animals, such as frogs, newts, hares, birds, and various insects. It supports a wide variety of plants; there are the ubiquitous bog cotton, water lilies, pitcher plants, pipewort, wintergreen, bog asphodel, and dozens more. The round-leaved sundew is an unexpected inhabitant of the boglands. Carnivorous, it traps insects on its sticky leaves and slowly digests them.

Digging the Peat

If you drive or, rather, bounce over any of Ireland’s old bog roads in the spring or summer, you will still see men and women digging the peat, or turf, as they call it. They still use the traditional slane, a special narrow-bladed spade often with an extra cutting edge set at right angles to the blade so that it can cut a sod of turf with one slice. The diggers spread these sods out to dry in the summer sunshine and later collect them for winter fuel. The aromatic smell of burning peat adds to the pleasure of soaking up the warmth of the fire on a cold winter night.

When men dig peat in this way, they are rather like ants raiding a huge food store. Even such digging, however, when added to land drainage schemes, has slowly altered the boglands over the past thousand years. The real threat, though, to the survival of the boglands has come in the last 40 years. That is when the mighty machines of Bord na Móna (The Irish Peat Board) have dug and scraped the peat from the boglands at an alarming rate.

Extracting peat on a large scale is not easy. Untouched bogland is 95 percent water, and it needs at least five years of constant drainage before the ingeniously designed digging machines can operate safely on the bog.

Once they have dug the peat, they do not leave wastelands. The authorities work hard to convert cutaway bogland into useful and productive land. However, this still means that the bogs themselves face extinction. In Ireland, less than 5 percent of the raised bogs with some kind of nature-reserve potential are left. It is no longer a case of ants raiding a food store. Now the whole store is being emptied and the building demolished.

Can They Survive?

Conservationists know that it is unrealistic to prohibit digging for peat. Using such accessible sources of energy makes good sense. But, they ask, must exploitation mean extinction? Catherine O’Connell of the IPCC asks: “Do we want the same thing to happen to our bogs as happened to the Dodo?”

Time will tell.

[Box on page 16]

Ireland’s Bogs Preserve More Than Peat

Bodies of people who drowned in the bogs or who were ritually executed centuries ago have been dug out of bogland in an amazing state of preservation. Country people used to store butter in the bog as in a primitive refrigerator. Turf cutters often come across wooden casks containing butter that were buried in the peat and never dug up. Beautiful artifacts in gold, silver, and bronze have been unearthed from hiding places in the bogs, where they were put to keep them secure from marauding Vikings.

[Box on page 17]

Bogs Can Be Dangerous

“Bogs can be dangerous places; never visit them alone,” is the warning sounded by some. Bogs are complex areas, full of drains, streams, and pools. Floating bogs can develop over deep lakes when a mat of peat forms over the lake surface. They quake when walked upon and can swallow people and animals.

“Sections of peat on sloped areas can break off from the main body of a blanket bog and flow downslope pushing over trees and destroying houses in much the same way as a volcanic lava flow destroys everything in its path.”

[Pictures on page 16, 17]

Top clockwise:

Turf stacked in Connemara, Ireland

Virgin bogland​—squelchy and treacherous

Carnivorous, round-leaved sundew

Safe haven for curlew’s nest

[Credit Line]

Dutch Foundation for Conservation of Irish Bogs

[Credit Line]

Dr. R. F. Hammond, Teagasc, Ireland (above and top right)