The Stove in Dumfries had a craftivism session last weekend for the forthcoming Stop Climate Chaos March in Edinburgh. This was a heartening session of ‘slow-activism’ – helping me decide what I care to wear as a heart on my sleeve. This was the moment to declare a growing love for mosses, and Sphagnum in particular.
Living with water is important around the Solway, and I’m learning that Sphagnum is a kind of aqueous super-hero. An individual Sphagnum moss is a strand of water-holding cells that can collectively create raised bogs many metres deep, over thousands of years.
Complete raised bogs are now rare. Dogden Moss in the Eastern Borders and Kirkconnel Flow west of Dumfries give hints of what the landscape in Southern Scotland was like before bogs were drained and dug. Beginning a tour of mosses, I have discovered the equivalent of mountain-top removal has been inflicted on them. My eye is getting tuned to tawny strips on the low horizon.
Dogden’s gravelly kaims make a curving ridge between two moors, debris of rivers that flowed under ice sheets. Woodcock sheltered in the heather and the moor houses shooting butts.
I did not dare leave the footway across Kirkconnel Flow.
Sphagnum in autumn colours, with frost later in the month.
Close up, you see different shapes and colours of different sphagnum species, which in 3D stretch in watery suspension metres down to the underlying rock. A natural environmental archive of eight thousand years of watery life is underfoot.
This human-made drainage ditch has been dammed, a recent reversal of policy. Peatland Action is a restoration programme co-ordinated by Scottish Natural Heritage: the reasons to conserve peatbogs are beautifully laid out in the National Peatland Plan. Importantly, peatbogs sequester carbon and are sinks for atmospheric carbon. This process is starting in the blocked ditch at Kirkconnel, as Sphagnum strands start a slow and steady occupation.
The Southern Upland Partnership has engineered a “bringing together of minds” connecting those looking after trees, soils, and water quality (Peatland Action, the Forestry Commission, Galloway Fisheries Trust).
Photograph courtesy of Southern Upland Partnership
Peatland Action has also included a Bugs on the Bog training event – getting local wildlife recorders enthused about bogs.
Photograph courtesy of Southern Upland Partnership
Across the Solway, Cumbrian Boglife is bringing raised bogs back to life. At Wedholme Flow, moss starts to grow back over peat exposed by years of extraction.
Wedholme Flow was covered by gossamer strands, with spiders spinning above.
I will march with a Sphagnum heart on my sleeve next Saturday. Also, I am inspired by craftivists, artists, bog enthusiasts, land managers and researchers to look more at mossy carbon landscapes in southern Scotland.
My thanks to: the Stove, Tabula Rasa Collaborations, Sarah Eno, Lauren Parry, David Borthwick, Pip Tabor.
drawing in the field 