Peatlands hold a fascinating history of past climates

THE DARK STUFF: Stories from the Peatlands, is ‘an evocative social history of Europe’s peatlands, moors, bogs and heaths’, written by Donald S Murray on the Isle of Lewis, author of Herring Tales and The Guga Stone.

Growing up on the family croft near Ness, Donald was ‘either playing or working on the moor, chasing sheep across empty acres and cutting and gathering peat for fuel’.

Murray’s latest book examines the life and traditions of Scotland’s moors, which make up 20 per cent or 7,000 square miles of the landscape, but a conversation with an Australian on the Isle of Iona drew his gaze beyond the Highlands and Islands to peatlands across the world, including the ‘infamous’ bogs of Tasmania.

The Australian told him: ‘The single most precious thing about bogs, worldwide, is their ability to preserve pollen grains.

‘Bogs contain layers and layers of environmental history dating back thousands of years. Palynologists identify these pollen grains and reconstruct past floras, and from that they can get at least some idea of past climates and how plant composition changes with climate.

‘It’s how we know what the landscape may have looked like during the last Ice Age, compared to how it looks now. Peatlands not only keep the world’s natural history safe, but can also give us a benchmark to develop a sense of how rapidly the world is changing now.’

Peat, Murray learned, comprises around three million square kilometres, around two per cent, of the earth’s land area. ‘The whole world was now peat, something I had half considered might be true on those wet and stormy days I was trapped on the island in my youth.

‘It existed not only in my immediate vicinity, beyond the house windows blurred by continual rainfall, not just in the northern hemisphere, but at the southern end of Patagonia in Argentina, the Falkland Islands, throughout Indonesia, New Zealand, and even the Kerguelen or Desolation Islands, not far from Antarctica, described by songwriter Al Stewart as “the loneliest place in the map”.’

The book investigates the moor in literature, art and folklore, including the uses for the 120 species of sphagnum moss, which can hold 20 times more water than they weigh when squeezed dry, when ‘it looks like a kitten that’s been standing too long in the rain’.

‘In earlier centuries it was used to line nappies, soaking up urine and excrement too when someone in a household was suffering dysentery or diarrhoea. Women employed it as a sanitary product; both genders as a way of treating haemorrhoids. In the modern age, it is still sometimes used to cleanse home pools and spas. It is assisted in this by possessing sterilising, cleansing qualities.

‘In the First World War and during many conflicts beforehand, sphagnum moss was used to staunch blood and to create clean and sterile dressings for wounds. It could be used to stuff pillows to prop up what remained of the arm or leg of an amputee.

‘An English firm, Peat Products (Sphagnol) Ltd … even advertised its ability to restore hair to an owner’s precious pet dog, a chow-chow.’

Murray also examines our perception of moorland, ‘asking how – for the sake, perhaps, of our planet’s survival – we can learn to love a landscape we have all too often in our history denigrated, feared and despised’.