Beneath the Bog of Time
By Stephen Rutt
January
Cranberries lie by my feet, in the sodden skin of the bog’s sphagnum moss. I pick one up, dry its shiny red skin on my fleece and eat it. Bitterness bursts into my mouth.
I am accompanying Andy, the reserve officer, on his data-logger rounds of Kirkconnel Flow, a few miles southwest of Dumfries. We are on top of ten metres of peat that shakes with each step, pooling glossy water around the soles of our wellies in a way that feels like a threat. Kirkconnel Flow is a solid wetland, an uneasy truce between water held stationary like soil and peat that moves like liquid. It feels like one careless step could undo this truce.
It is more productive to walk over the heather, though it is misleading to experience the flow dryly walking from heather clump to heather clump. It is called a flow for a reason. Water gurgles around us, the wet ground sucks at our feet. Andy’s data-loggers are recording the water level of the flow. He gets a laptop out of his rucksack, plugs it into the data-logger and kneels in the heather. The team have been building bunds and finding the holes, where the water has been escaping, and fixing them. The technology reveals whether the peatland restoration—their attempt at fixing a leaky bog—has done its work. Whether the flow is full with water again, whether it is flowing with life.
While Andy looks at the screen, I look around at the warmth of the winter vegetation. The heather is twiggy, bony in its winter bareness. It sits over a layer of dark-green blaeberry bushes and light green reindeer moss. Sodden sphagnum is a green in-between. Like the cranberries, it is only through looking down that this world is revealed.
To look up: through the bare heather a wren fidgets, flicking from clump to clump, its tail cocked, its voice irritable, scolding our presence. It is a warmer brown than the heather, but not as warm as the tawny bog, the colour of a stag’s fur. The brown and green at my feet becomes richer, warmer when seen at distance, not dissimilar to the warm brown of the Scots pine bark that is our horizon. Distantly there are coffee-coloured ponds. But this is not as distant as it is possible to see in a bog. Peat accretes, acquiring dead matter that doesn’t decay. Instead, in the waterlogged, oxygen-starved conditions, materials are preserved in their state of death; whether the peat-stained bodies of dead people, drowned on land or sacrificed here from millennia ago, or the skeletons of extinct animals like the Irish elk, a deer with antlers that spanned three metres.
The upshot of this is to say that peat bogs grow at a measurable rate. One millimetre a year. The ten metres below me has steadily accumulated over the past 10,000 years. And if I was to sink below the surface—which always feels possible on this weird ground—it wouldn’t be long before I was closer to the last ice age than the current day.
March
I am a naturalist. I just am—I could concoct clever explanations as to why, but sooner or later it all comes back to this: I like being outside, finding species. Birds, plants, insects, reptiles give me a thrill, whether from their own particular charisma, or the moment of recognition, their identity or their role in nature’s vast web of meanings, signs and signals. It is a thrill I am hooked on. The side-effect: this thrill-seeking takes me to places like the Flow.
The ground is different here. So are the seasons. It is an extreme, acidic environment and all the familiar signifiers for how we perceive the passing of time are changed. There is still spring birdsong, but what I am currently hearing isn’t that but the excitement calls of crossbills. The crossbill above my head is dangling upside down as it fillets the seeds out of the pinecone skeleton. It is a male, pink against the green needles of the tree, the females out of sight, coming to the end of their time on the nests, where they’ve sat through the end of this brutal winter, the first species to breed in the new year. Soon there will be the song-flights of tree pipit, rising slowly up from a tree stump to the sky and back, singing effervescently. As the season continues, ticks emerge, lurking in the vegetation, swapping hosts, sinking their jaws through fur or skin in search of the blood meal that lets them grow; the night reverberates to the strange nocturnal churring of nightjar and the sneezing squeaks of woodcock; the summer finding its zenith in pink heather and purple blaeberry, the flora at its brightest when everywhere else has gone dull green, waiting for autumn. While the woods around here turn bronze and gold, the bog is ringed by pines that stay resolutely dull green all autumn, unchanging from the same dull green as spring, summer, winter.
This scene, this condensed strange year is playing out across Scotland, where 20% of our earth is peat.
August
The benefit to being freelance is the opportunity to shuffle time like a pack of cards. Your to-do list: finish the essay, complete the paperwork, catch hightide at the beach. It helps that these days are our smug revenge. Throughout our dreich July, our inboxes filled with marketing emails, telling us to stock up for a heatwave. These days we are now temporarily hotter and sunnier than the south of England.
It’s taps aff and sun cream season.
A few days ago I saw a tweet. It had a picture of a pair of dragonflies, the male perched on a log, his claspers in the protective position around the nape of the female, whose abdomen was dangling deep into a peaty pool, laying eggs into the sun-warmed water. The blue saddle at the top of the abdomen made it an emperor—eyes like peas and a suede-beige thorax made it better. These are lesser emperors. The fifth occurrence of this species in Scotland; the first time they had ever been seen mating and egg-laying in this country. And they were at Kirkconnel Flow.
It is three weeks since we last visited. The bog is reaching its peak: the heather now pink, below the distant pines, the blushing horizon. The blaeberries in the wood have finally ripened to sweet perfection, clustering across the bushes in the woodland floor by their thousands, delaying our walk to the pools. Our last visit was at dusk, when the woodland seemed threateningly thick and tangled. This blazing afternoon, the woodland has lost the eerie creep it held at night, the threat replaced with fruit. The almost thirty-degree heat bakes most things out of the afternoon.
The effect of a winter spent fixing the leaks resulted in spreading a series of pools between the bigger stands of heather. Eventually sphagnum moss, the creeping skin of the bog, will fill these up. It will fix the water in its place, part of the slow creation of a peat bog, soil creeping over, locking the water underground. It’s an open question how many years this will take, when a bog grows at the rate of a millimetre a year, a metre a millennium. In the meantime, it has created the ideal transient dragonfly habitat, the water fixed and fed from the deep of the bog; it feels like a mirage in the fierce heat of a week that has dried up puddles and ponds.
Dragonflies are solar-powered. I love them for this: for their habit of ceaselessly patrolling their square metres of water, in the long hot afternoons when everything else has given up, when everything with sense has sought shelter and shade. In the new water of the bog, the new dragonflies are hiding in a frantic buzz of dragonfly life. Hawkers—common and migrant, two variations on the same, almost-identical, theme—are flying incessantly, at a constant pace, unpredictable in direction. Four-spotted chasers, at the end of their flight season, almost look burned out, their orange-brown bodies faded to an olive-grey tone, sustained only by the lingering sun and a diet of midges and mosquitoes that skim low over the water’s surface. And the emperors: each one scrutinised but each one blue and big, clearly a size above everything else. Nothing slighter, nothing wearing suede.
This is not a surprise: there is too much water, too many dragonflies, too much heat to see everything in its entirety. The afternoon passes quickly and the deck of time needs to be cut, reshuffled and dealt again. I may have missed out on seeing the lesser emperors (I may never hear the end of this from the wardens). But I don’t mind: it feels good enough to be seeing this habitat here, now, and its insect-life thriving in a time when that itself is the real rarity.
The deck of time. Underneath my feet it would be possible to take a peat core, to plunge a circular tube deep into the ground and bring up a sample of the earth underneath. As the peat prevents things from decaying, you can tell what the conditions were like from the matter that survives: the mosses that show it was wetter, the grasses that show it was drier, the pollen grains that reveal what else was growing at the time. This brief era of the lesser emperor dragonfly won’t be recorded. One perfect summer of water and sun won’t register as anything other than a millimetre of mossier peat in a millennia’s time, the eggs that she laid in the water unlikely to survive the cold of the winter.
February
This strange soil, this solid-wetland, is an excellent store of carbon. In its rich black essence, it poses us a problem: it becomes a resource. It can be cut and burnt, an equivalent of firewood for the highland and island dwellers where trees are a novel commodity. Or for lowlanders, it becomes a compost, a way of supercharging your garden soil, turning time into tulips.
What makes peat so rich in energy is what makes it special, the richness of time’s accumulated decay. Any disturbance to it, whether in the form of cutting and burning as fuel, or collecting for compost, disturbs and releases this carbon into the atmosphere.
It makes peat a habitat under threat, in a planet under threat.
Dumfries and Galloway Council have just refused permission for an extension to the exploitation of Nutberry Moss. The Ferret reports that the council’s decision was informed by the ongoing climate crisis. The Moss can be seen from the A75 as you drive west from Gretna towards Annan, as a thick black scar in the middle of the green landscape, a gaping open wound, leaching carbon locked into the soil from…well, pick any time from now until the last Ice Age, you might be right or within a millennium at least.
The fate of these bogs, leaching their time and carbon under grey skies, devoid of their specialist wildlife, reinforces the work that has been done at Kirkconnel Flow. The preservation and restoration of one lowland bog, locking carbon in the ground, storing the energy of time in a place where dragonflies zip through air and rare birds sing and cranberries grow out of wet moss.
March
It is somewhere between winter and spring, these slippery days that offer a promise of the summer to come: 14 degrees, shirt-sleeves and a bright blue sky, yet the day remains cold at the edges, with the threat of being caught out by a cold breeze or unexpected rainfall always present. And I am at the Flow with my partner, Miranda, walking over the path that alternates between boardwalk and earth, the peat underfoot soft to the tread of our boots. We are walking slowly, staring intently at the ground, because while the ground explains so much about this place, it also hides what we have come here to find.
We are here for adders. In these slippery days they are an early sign of spring’s slow slither across Scotland’s peatlands, roused from their hibernation by these sun-warmed pockets of air in the heather, bracken and grass. It is something we feel compelled to witness whenever possible, the passing of time, a sort of reassurance that we are leaving winter behind. But knowing they are here does not make them easy to find. The bog is big and the path cuts through a tiny portion of it, where the ground is firmer, partly because firm ground is a rarity here. Firm is generous, though: the peat trembles as you walk. The rest of the bog bulges, the heather and cotton grass merely a skin over the stored water.
We are walking slowly. Each footfall is incredibly precise, not only for the certainty of solid ground but for the certainty of not standing on a snake. We step where we can see the ground, trusting the certainty of our vision and not the blind faith of thick heather. But on the time-frame of a peatbog, our slow and certain steps are incredibly quick and soon we have reached the far point of the bog. The sun is still high in the clear blue sky, the weather still exceptional for March.
I don’t know what makes me turn around, what makes me convince Miranda to retrace our steps instead of completing the looping path. Some gut feeling or other. But we re-enter the wooded path and five paces later I am brought to a halt. My eye catches on an interruption to the pattern of tangled pale grasses and leaves the colour of rust. It could be a gnarled and kinked branch, but it isn’t. It doesn’t need to move for me to see that black zig-zag of scales, tapering to a thin point at the far end, or the blunt end looking at me, its dark and beady eye knowing where I am, the faint flicker of a dark forked tongue tasting the air. Adder: shade and shadow brought to life, the dark heart of the peat bog, of spring, here. In the dark of the wood it is sluggish. Its movements are slow and deliberate. It holds its head above the ground as the rest of it slithers, in slow motion, towards the thick grass by the base of a tree trunk where it slips out of sight.
It takes three minutes for it to disappear, according to the times of the photographs that I took. Three minutes that unspooled in awe, indelibly inked in my mind; the slowing of time in thrill. Three minutes that pass as quick as minutes always do, leaving the woodland floor almost identical to how it was before but without the presence of the snake, charging the scene.
Nature writing is a strange science. So much of the method and the data collection is up to pure chance: the fluke of the weather forecast and how it falls between deadlines, the transience of time (mine, the snake’s, the sun’s). It was three years since I had last seen an adder, and if it wasn’t for the fortunate flick of my eyes it could have been three years yet before I saw another, before another strange concatenation of time results in the sharing of our transient presences, the synchronising of human and snake time to these exact seconds.
What haunts me is what will remain unknown: what the method of nature writing can’t reveal, what passed this way five minutes before, what flies and slithers and moves silently behind my back, while my attention is turned elsewhere. What haunts me further is the deeper bed of time that this lies upon. That the wren that flickers through the skin of heather could be only metres from an Irish elk skull or a preserved iron age body, floating in the soil, through the peat’s evidence of changing time. And if I was to sink below the surface—which always feels possible on this weird ground—it wouldn’t be long before I was closer to the last ice age than the current day, a fact that leaves me feeling something like vertigo, as small and inconsequential as a cranberry on the bog of time.
