We present an extract from Ten Thousand Years Deep – The Story of Ireland's Peatlands, the new book by Carsten Krieger.
They cover more than one million hectares of Ireland's land mass. They can be found at the coast and in the mountains. They have helped to shape the country’s history and heritage, and they are the most intriguing habitat there is – for me, at least. They are our peatlands.
I spent my first year in Ireland in an old cottage in the middle of Shragh Bog near Doonbeg in County Clare. This bog is typical for Ireland, partly cultivated for farming and partly used as a domestic fuel source. While it is far from its original state, I couldn’t escape its lure. A few steps out the back door would bring me onto the bog road, a pothole-covered track giving access to the turf banks, running past dark Sitka spruce plantations, along pastures divided by rows of the massive root structures of bog pines, dug out from the numerous turf banks. Here and there, pockets of living and growing bog stood out, a symphony of the vibrant green, red and yellow of sphagnum mosses, dotted with tiny red sundews, green sedges and grey lichen.
In spring and summer, the skylark would sing high above, interrupted from time to time by the call of the cuckoo and the ghostly drumming of the snipe. In April and May, turf sods would appear, laid out neatly to dry on top of the turf banks and beside the road. Later, these sods would be footed into stacks and the common cotton grass, better known as bog cotton, would grow around them, creating a sea of fluffy, snow-white heads bopping in the breeze. In places, heathers, marsh orchids and bog asphodel would thrive, and dragonflies and damselflies would show off their air acrobatics over the pools that had formed beside the turf banks. In late summer, tractors and trailers would turn up to bring home the turf, and in autumn, the rich green of summer would be replaced by a variety of warm brown tones, glowing in the light of the rising and setting sun. Then the bog would turn eerily quiet. Heavy rain would leave the remains of grasses, sedges and heathers covered in a glistening film of water, which would turn into a sparkling frost during the coldest of the winter nights.
Ever since these days, more than twenty years ago, I have tried to learn as much as I can about Ireland's peatlands; to explore them, and to understand them.
Blanket Bog, Heath & Marsh:
The landscape of the west of Ireland couldn’t be more different to the gentle and domesticated countryside of the midlands. In the southwest, some of Ireland’s highest mountain ranges, namely the Macgillycuddy’s Reeks and the Brandon Range, stretch their sandstone peaks towards the sky. Further north, Connemara and Joyce’s Country feature rugged plains and the unmistakable quartzite domes of the 12 Bens and Maumturk Mountains. County Mayo displays the epitaph of emptiness with the vast open landscapes of Ballycroy and Bangor overshadowed by the distant Nephin Beg mountain range. In the north-west, County Donegal portraits itself with the sweeping granite hills of Derryveagh rising between spacious valleys. What all these landscapes, despite their varying underlying geology, have in common is a habitat that is as beautiful as it is desolate, the blanket bog, covering the land from the coastal fringes up into the mountains.
On a global scale, blanket bog is a comparably rare habitat, restricted mainly to the boreal regions of the northern hemisphere and the western seaboards of Ireland and Scotland. Ireland holds 8% of the world’s blanket bogs, most of them located on the plains and mountains of its western counties.
The origin of this landscape, like that of the peatlands of the midlands, lies in a distant past. The circumstances that led to the development of blanket bogs were, however, very much different to those that gave rise to the fens and raised bogs. After the glaciers of the Ice Age had retreated some 10,000 years ago, a tundra landscape established itself and over time developed into habitats of vast grasslands and forests that covered the plains and extended into the mountains. In the west, this landscape was built onto a shallow layer of soil. Beneath that soil lay a foundation made of acidic bedrock. In the west and northwest, these rocks were granite, quartz and rhyolite; in the southwest, red sandstone. As a consequence, the soil overlaying the bedrock was also slightly acidic, which turned out to be the first puzzle piece needed for the growth of peat. As long as the relatively dry boreal climate – characterised by long, cold winters and short, warm summers – prevailed, peat only managed to develop in areas of poor drainage, where water could accumulate on the surface. In these pockets, the waterlogged ground in combination with the acidic conditions created by the bedrock decomposing. This material accumulated and over time and under its own weight was compressed into the first peat layers. In the post-glacial landscape, these pockets appeared as areas of marsh and heath as well as swamp woodland as early as 9,000 years ago.
These embryonic blanket bogs were confined to their wet cradles until the continental climate regime was replaced by today’s Atlantic oceanic climate. While this new regime, with its increased precipitation and year-round mild temperatures, influenced all of Ireland and played a major role in the formation of the raised bogs of the midlands, its greatest effect was felt along the western seaboard. Here, the vast mountain chains caught much of the incoming moisture and forced it on the landscape as rain, drizzle, fog, hail and snow. This constant watery onslaught caused minerals to be washed from the soil and accumulate in what is known as the iron pan, an impermeable layer in the ground that caused the soil above it to become permanently waterlogged. The wet climate and water-saturated ground were the other pieces of the puzzle the blanket bog needed to start its reign. Blanket bog needs precipitation of 1,250 millimetres a year spread out over at least 250 days to thrive, and the new conditions provided just that. Invigorated by the constant water supply, the young peatlands left their birthplace and spread over the landscape, engulfing anything in their way.
Ten Thousand Years Deep – The Story of Ireland’s Peatlands is published by The O’Brien Press
