History/nature The Dark Stuff
Donald S. Murray (Bloomsbury, £16.99)
Donald Murray captures beautifully the ‘intimidating’ landscape he has known since childhood. ‘Little could be seen but chains of bogs and still black pools,’ he writes. ‘you could easily stumble across your own steps, crisscrossing the moorland in endless, decreasing circles’. He is on the Isle of Lewis, a far outpost of Europe’s periphery, where the peat that covers most of the island is of universal significance.
Mr Murray describes how the ‘dark stuff’ was valued above all commodities. Superior to the alternative of cowpats, it provided fuel for keeping warm and cooking where there are no trees, and turf charcoal fired the forges that made metal tools.
Peat varies just as different timbers do, it transpires. Lewis has some of the deepest and blackest, perfect for long, hot burning. Visitors to the outer Hebrides will have snuffed its unmistakeable aroma on the air and, once smelt, its association with the islands holds.
I live in the peatlands of Sutherland and burn peat, too; passers-by comment on the sweet peaty ‘reek’ from the open fire. Lately, I supplemented my peatstack with bought-in peat briquettes from Germany, which intensify the heat and are more easily handled. Far from the novelty I had imagined they were, I now learn that the roman naturalist Pliny reported the formation of briquettes in old Germany. When the bogs were too wet, peat was macerated by hand —or even feet—into blocks that were lighter and easier to transport. and so we come full circle.
Peat is also a faithful preserver, revealing ancient pollen residues as well as, somewhat disturbingly, human remains stitched together from different individuals who lived centuries apart. The author delves deeper into the religious rituals that created these composite skeletons, before venturing further afield—for this is also a travel book, which takes us from the Hebrides and Ireland to the netherlands and Denmark.
In 15th-century Holland, where peat was valued not only for firing the kilns that produced Delft pottery, but also for providing the heat to ferment and distill ale and gin, the Dutch drank so much alcohol that they stripped the landscape bare of this essential fuel—even despite the limited harvest time (peat cannot be cut in severe cold because frost breaks it up).
Towards the end of the book, the author drifts to stock observations on the Highland Clearances and the English Enclosures—as well as, less predictably, a discourse on the penal colonies marooned on Holland’s peat moors—before adjusting his compass to end with a reflection on the healing and spiritually restorative properties of the peat bog’s medicinal plants and wildlife.
This is a good story, well-told, which illuminates a weatherlashed part of Britain where the light may seldom shine, but wher the linkage with our past is unbroken through the extraordinary peatlands and the secrets they contain. Michael Wigan