Peatlands

Ecology, Conservation and Heritage

Ian D. Rotherham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429799525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Écosystèmes et Habitats

This book provides an introduction to peatlands for the non-specialist student reader and for all those concerned about environmental protection, and is an essential guide to peatland history and heritage for scientists and enthusiasts.

Peat is formed when vegetation partially decays in a waterlogged environment and occurs extensively throughout both temperate and tropical regions. Interest in peatlands is currently high due to the degradation of global peatlands which is disrupting hydrology and contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. This book opens by explaining how peat is formed, its properties and worldwide distribution, and defines related terms such as mires, wetlands, bogs and marshes. There is discussion of the ecology and wildlife of peatlands as well as their ability to preserve pollen and organic remains as environmental archives. It also addresses the history, heritage and cultural exploitation of peat, extending back to pre-Roman times, and the degradation of peatlands over the centuries, particularly as a source of fuel but more recently for commercial horticulture. Other chapters discuss the ecosystem services delivered by peatlands, and how their destruction is contributing to biodiversity loss, flooding or drought, and climate change. Finally, the many current peatland restoration projects around the world are highlighted.

Overall the book provides a wide-ranging but concise overview of peatlands from both a natural and social science perspective, and will be invaluable for students of ecology, geography, environmental studies and history.

PART 1
Setting the scene

1

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

Peat and peatlands

An introduction to peat and peat-cutting

The Roman writer Pliny in his Natural History described peat-cutting in the first century AD, by German tribes along the Rivers Elbe and Ems.

They weave nets of rushes and sedges to catch fish; and form mud with their hands, which, when dried in the wind rather than in the sun, is burned to cook their food, and warm their bodies chilled by the cold north wind.

There is archaeological evidence for peat-cutting in Denmark and both the English Fens and Somerset Levels in the pre-Roman period. Peat-cutting tools have been identified, and even cut turves over two thousand years old have been found. A Classical description of the Celtic Batavi tribe suggested that they were so wretched that ‘… their drink is the drink of swine, and they burn their very earth for warmth’, meaning that they drank beer and burned turf. Early writers referred to peat as ‘combustible earth’, so Cardinal Piccolomini, in 1458, described how the people of Friesland made ‘… fires of combustible earth, since they lacked firewood’ (Rotherham, 2009).

Peat fuel use over the millennia has almost ceased in most areas. Many people associate peat-cutting with Ireland or the Western Isles of Scotland, or late-twentieth-century industrial extraction. Yet historically, peat and turf were the common fuels for most people across the whole country. Indeed the mark of the peat-cutter is written deep in the landscapes of Britain. In regions like Somerset, Cornwall, and North Wales, older people still recall the distinctive peat reek in their cottages. Associated with traditional community peat-cutting and use were distinctive tools and implements, and long-standing cultural attachments and folklore. In Scotland and the Isles, and in Ireland itself, peat-cutting is still important in culture, folk memory, and identity. However, across much of Wales and most of England, the memories are long past. I captured some of this in a book I wrote on the history of ‘Peat and Peat Cutting’ (Rotherham, 2009).

The cultural history of peatlands extends from the Iron Age to the twentieth century, which gave us the Norfolk Broads and other distinctive landscapes, and was a part of most people’s lives. Towns and cities like York, Norwich, Kendal, Carlisle, and even Liverpool depended on peat fuel. The former mosslands are written into today’s landscapes as place-names, even when all other evidence has gone. In recent times peat was used as fuel in the Fens, in the Somerset Levels, in the Lake District and North Lancashire, on the North Yorkshire Moors, in Devon and Cornwall, and in North Wales. In almost all these regions there is no active cutting today. There remain maybe three peat-cutters in North Yorkshire, and in West Yorkshire the Graveship of Holme is one of England’s last organised community peat mosses, but there is a smaller site still being worked just north of here at Oxenhope.

How peat was cut, processed, and used varied through time and between regions, and this is a rich cultural tapestry that is in danger of being lost from memory. Local rural history museums preserve some implements and even buildings complete with traditional hearths but often run on a peppercorn income, sometimes when these close entire collections are dissipated. A deep sense of history and mystery concerns many of the traditions of common rights and their attachments to particular buildings or hearths – sometimes true and at other times wishful thinking. Famous cottage fires, or particularly those in old inns, burnt continuously for decades or even centuries and local people placed great importance on these.

Then in Britain, Europe, and the USA, from the mid-1800s commercial peat extraction and processing industries emerged – often the final nail in the coffin of many peatlands. Even so, the history and culture of the early industries mixed with older, local traditions and left an element of cultural heritage. However, industry and agriculture ultimately removed most peatlands as many were lost to drainage and farming ‘improvement’ from the 1700s to the 1900s. Commercial peat-mining was often followed by conversion to intensive agriculture. Also, as peat as domestic fuel fell out of use, it was often displaced by firewood and then coal, gas, oil, or electricity – all more expensive but more convenient.

The Black Waters – peatlands as contested spaces

The connections between history and ecology are frequently overlooked. However, the human history of peatlands is central to understanding both their loss and in some cases their survival. Around the world, these sometimes vast landscapes were (and sometimes still are) rich resources for exploitation (from early subsistence to modern industrial usage). However, they were also places of sanctuary, non-conformism, and independence. Even today in Great Britain, since the removal of common rights and the imposition of extensive sheep-farming and grouse-shooting, many upland moors and bogs remain strongly contested landscapes. In the twenty-first-century peatlands, now often ‘leisurely landscapes’, the different recreational stakeholders vie for control and usage – from grouse-shooting to mountain biking, and from birdwatching to hill-running; moors, mires, and bogs are still contested.

A major reason for the loss of many peatlands was the displacement of long-established communities and their rights of common. In the uplands this involved ring-fencing the moors and bogs, depopulating them of indigenous people, and replacing them with paid shepherds and gamekeepers. In the lowlands, removal of the common people was generally followed by widespread drainage and often total destruction. The landscapes and their communities in these regions today are radically altered from those before the enclosure, to such an extent that in many cases the one-time existence of peatlands is totally forgotten. Similar parallels are seen around the world today, especially in the tropical peat forests. In these cases, the locally indigenous forest dwellers are aggressively (and often illegally) displaced as commercial interests pursue firstly the timber for logging and secondly the clearance of the peat forest and its reuse for plantation cropping.

There is a further twist in the human attitude to these peatscapes which is based around fear and loathing of them as vast, impenetrable ‘black waters’ full of dangers and disease. Bogs, fens, mires, and moors have been seen by outsiders as unpleasant and frightening places and their inhabitants often as strange, foreign people. Such fears and attitudes have shaped human approaches to peat landscapes past and present, and continue to do so even in modern times.

Peat and both bogs and fens are important in British culture; in the past valued but also feared with bogs as black waters, places of doom and gloom (Rotherham, 2013c). Neither land nor water, they are something in-between, and those not of bog or fen found them fearful places where a misplaced footstep could mean slow death by drowning. Almost everyone has seen the villain sink into the Great Grimpen Mire in Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, and many people still fear the northern moors as the place of the ‘Moors Murders’. These places are productive landscapes that supported people for centuries, but fearsome and loathsome to strangers. Peat and bogs are imprinted on our minds and language with terms like ‘bogged down’ and ‘mired down’. The idea of a ‘damper’ or ‘putting the dampers’ on something, or ‘dampening down’ derived from placing a damp piece of turf on the peat fire the last thing at night to keep the fire smouldering until dawn. Seminal moments in history are linked to bogs, fens, and peat. It was in the bogs and fens of Sedgemoor and Athelney that the Saxon King Alfred held out against the Viking invaders, and the perhaps apocryphal cakes he burnt on the fire would have been oatcakes on a peat fire rather than the singed coffee cake of popular imagination. But this is an image emblazoned in the mind of every schoolchild taught English history, and at its core is a peat fire smouldering away. After 1066, Hereward the Wake, the last great Saxon leader, maintained his stronghold against Norman overlords in the Isle of Ely, a small area of dry land in a sea of fens, water, and peat bog. And the last major battle on English soil, the battle of Sedgemoor in Somerset was fought, won, and lost in the middle of a great fen.

In Ireland there are early references to peat in the few written sources to early Irish life. In particular there are extracts from the Senchas Már, the Old Irish law text. There were also significant fines for illegal peat-cutting, and cases of accidental drowning in ‘the ditch of a turf cutting’ were excluded from liability. Most of the turf was cut as slices in a relatively dry and structured state. However, if the peat was too wet and problems of drainage too intractable to dry the working area, it was extracted as a sort of mud. In the bogs of Cavan, Leitrim, Down, and Sligo this was described by Boate in the 1700s: ‘On that dry place where the mud is poured forth, sit certain women upon their knees, who mold the turf, using nothing else do it but their hands’. This ‘mud turf’ was still being made from peat taken from Ardee Bog in County Louth in the 1980s; taken down the River Dee to be sold as fuel in Ardee town (Rotherham, 2009).

Peat and peatlands

An account of peat and peatlands needs to address basic questions of ‘what is peat?’ and ‘where is it found?’ In describing peat it is necessary to consider the types as well as its physical and chemical characteristics, and these are along with how it is formed and how it behaves. In describing peatlands, that is, sites or landscapes where peat deposits are significant, there are issues of distribution, diversity, and classification to cover mires, bogs, marshes, heaths, moors, and fens. There is a rich literature and in recent decades, triggered by major works on restoration and a growing awareness of ecosystem service and economic value issues, there has been an explosion of papers and books on the subject. Furthermore, temperate peatlands are embedded in wider ecological landscapes and this is often not fully appreciated. So ‘heathlands’, ‘moors’, and ‘commons’ often share origins with peatlands such as bogs and fens, and indeed, maybe be physically embedded within them. This means that in both landscape historical and ecological literature there is a broad overlap and commonality with the writing of say Gimingham (1972), and Webb (1986, 1998), and for example, Rotherham (1995, 2011a, b).

Early accounts include the papers of Gorham (e.g. 1953, 1957) and then the landmark volume by Moore & Bellamy (1974) which in many ways was the start of the modern era of peatlands research. Their book was one of the first major accounts to attempt a comprehensive overview of temperate peatlands. Others followed and in 1995, for example, Wheeler & Shaw wrote a good overview of peatland classification and functioning. This volume also provided a first thorough account of approaches to restoration of damaged peatlands. Brooks & Stoneman (1997) produced a useful and succinct volume as a conservation management handbook for peatlands. Also, in 1997, Parkyn et al. edited a major multi-authored text on peatland conservation that brought together much of the current knowledge at that time. Bringing the outputs up-to-date, with many excellent papers over this period (such as Vasander et al., 2003), the huge undertaking by Joosten et al. (2017) was the most comprehensive account to date, though mostly restricted to Europe. Most of these works consider ecology, hydrology, chemistry, function, and restoration. However, almost none of these or indeed the extensive literature not mentioned here directly addresses the human cultural history and nature of these eco-cultural landscapes. Nor do they pay any attention to the archaeology of peatlands beyond the use...