Driving West from Lerwick reveals a dry and uneven landscape, a flush of purple from early heather blooms, and a worked land: blue dots of hagglunds, the occasional poised yellow digger, and bags half filled with peat – or stacks of peat bricks drying under the sun, which will soon be collected for the Winter fires.
Kerry and I, Carys, – artist and education officer respectively – were on a quest through the North of Scotland to find peatlands and ways of connecting. Our first stop was still on the mainland, if only just: Caithness and Sutherland, home to the Flow Country, the UK’s largest blanket bog and – just after we visited – now recognised as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
I grew up in Caithness, a step from the North coast, with the islands of Stroma and the Orkneys a familiar view from my window. My first experience of peat was cutting it – although I was only the stacker and dog-minder in those young summers – and I wrote a blog on that here. My second experience was as a residential volunteer at Forsinard Flows, the RSPB reserve deep in Sutherland. It was a pleasant homecoming; something about playing the tour guide for Kerry, who looked at my nostalgia with new eyes and encouraged me to do the same.
We somehow spent two hours at the boardwalk and lookout tower, although it isn’t a long walk. There are old scars of peat banks and pools full of swaying bog bean at first glance, and then, once your eye is in, you see them: small sundews, the iconic leaves of milk and butterwort, the electric blue of damselflies and the startling sized dragonflies. Even a lizard, pulling itself from a pool, to bask in the sun. The peatland was drier than I remembered, but still full of life. The size of the landscape seemed impossible; the flat land spreads out until it rises into great hills far in the distance, or is swallowed by plantation forestry still to come down and be restored to blanket bog.
It was in Orkney, at a café beside the ~5000 year old village of Skara Brae, that Kerry and I started the conversation that would continue throughout our trip. How do we connect people to peatlands? Currently, the avenues in are science (and climate change – appealing to only a few likeminded people), peat-free gardening, or windfarm developments. For most people, that isn’t particularly exciting or inspiring.
I drew a clumsy graph of my thoughts. What is most unfamiliar or familiar is most engaged with. One on side are the rainforests, the coral reefs, the arctic ice. The exotic captures our imaginations. On the very other end is what an individual is most familiar with, whatever that may be. Wherever their work or hobbies take them, or whatever places and landscapes defined their life, is what sits in our hearts. I listed mine out as an environmental autobiography: the large garden in a built-up town; the woodlands I explored on my own; the peatlands we scrambled over; the coastlines we walked.
For so many people, peatlands will sit in the middle of this graph. Not wholly unfamiliar, but not seen as important to the everyday life. How do we move them closer to the familiar, and therefore the more engaged?
This set the tone for snatches of conversation when we arrived on Shetland.
The overnight ferry across was a loud beast, but the sailing was smooth. We boarded at midnight and dragged ourselves into the main town of Lerwick at 8am, which lies low against the land in an effort to duck the regular gales. We drove across to Walls (drop the L’s and swap the S to Z to pronounce correctly) on roads that wind in and out, following the curve of the sea. Our homely cottage looked out onto a small pier, seabirds, and a spread of delightful smelling sea campions. We noticed very little of this that morning; rest was the only thing on our agenda.
That day we explored and got a feel for the place and community of Shetland. This included, among many things, a well-stocked bookshop, a highly recommended ice cream and café, and a lot of wool.
The Saturday was the start of our World Bog Day events. We met Sue and Ash, the Peatland ACTION project officers from Shetland Amenity Trust, at the Shetland Museum and Archives learning room. We set up a path of peat for visitors: a bucket of sphagnum, its colours a shock of red and greens; cottongrass heads in a jar like an Instagram influencer’s kitchen; heather on the cusp of blooming; wet peat; dry peat; bog wood 3000 years old; and finally a series of peat cores up to 1m and which, at the 1m mark, was roughly 1000 years old. Much like our core at the Scottish Archaeology Fair in Castle Douglas 2022, we had flags available for people to write historical or ancestral events and mark it on our timeline. It became populated through the day, including with one Australian visitor’s mark of when her family was deported to Australia following the stealing of a goose and three goslings.
Some twenty-five people chatted with us over the two-and-a-half hours. The conversations were deep and continually touched on our topic of peatlands and their familiarity. One man shared that his nephew-in-law was happy to have settled in the UK because of the colours of the moorland he saw from his office window. Another spoke about his career driving diggers and recognised the challenges that peatlands would give to heavy machinery. One woman, from Skye, worried about the impact of multiple proposed wind farms on their peatlands. We used the many drawings that Kerry had created for our card game (more on that in a future post) to illustrate the narrative of peatland restoration. Here, this is what a degraded feature looks like; we call it a hag. There is how we make the sides less step, and then we do this to hold water back. Afterwards we hope it looks like this, wet and full with sphagnum.
The event went by quickly this way, with few lulls in visitors thanks to Ash who stood in the museum foyer telling people that experts are here for one day only to talk to you about peatlands! After packing up, we had a quick site visit to where Kerry would be running her event the next day, and took a scenic detour through the peatlands of Shetland back to Walls.
Kerry’s event – a performative drawing twinned with her partner Helmut’s in Dumfries and Galloway – took place on a recently restored site near Girlsta. The land dips down into a loch, and slowly rises again to meet a distant horizon. On our right, the fence cut the land between restored and unrestored, a neat juxtaposition. The harsh cuts and erosion features suddenly smooth out, like contractors had simply taken a rolling pin to the land.
Kerry, on her low stage, experimented with movement and science. She held a quadrat (see picture) high and turned ever so slowly, giving a weight and reverence to the random choosing of the next subject. A purposeful twist to the side and then the quadrat was tossed, in much the same way that an ecologist would, and Kerry explored what it framed. A sundew, sphagnum, and bog cotton were among her models.
Throughout the event, Sue and I chatted with visitors including the artist Roxane Permar, who is also a Research Fellow, Reader, and Programme Leader for the MA Art and Social Practice, Shetland College UHI. It was interesting to listen to her and Kerry talk about a topic I had very little knowledge or experience of, though they were kind enough to include me in their definition of artist!
Kerry and I continued to come back to our original topic set on Orkney throughout that day and the next, on a thankfully quieter ferry that would take us to Aberdeen for the morning. What are the aesthetics of peatlands, and how can we use that as the connection? How did people talk about peatlands with us throughout the events? How are the peatlands different on Shetland, and how can we ensure that we have a wider lens than only Dumfries and Galloway in the work and projects that we produce?
Shetland peatlands have no plantation forestry on them, though this is a significant part of the landscape for both D&G and Caithness/Sutherland. But the peatlands on these islands are prone to bog slides, and have had two recently. These peatlands are also still cut more regularly, and that is a key part of culture and introduction to peatlands, and this is likely to be true on the western Islands too.
We’re on the cusp of creating a series of education resources for primary, secondary, and adult learners. How do we make sure not to alienate anyone but instead provide them with content or art that they will find familiar, no matter where on Scotland they grew up, live, or work?
These answers aren’t going to come immediately, but our thoughts are a lot more formed after this trip, which was exactly what the goal was even if we didn’t have a series of questions we were going in to answer. Kerry and I are full of ideas and excitement for incorporating our learning into new projects and we will, of course, keep the blog updated when that is the case.
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