Originally published 4 September 1989
DINGLE, Ireland — They say it was one of the driest Irish summers in years, but on the Kerry hillside where I’ve been staying there’s water aplenty. It tumbles from the clouds. It hangs in the air. It seeps out of the ground. It glistens as dew. Around here it rains 250 days a year and the ground is never dry. Perfect conditions for a peat bog.
Ireland is not the only place in the world with peat, but it is certainly the best known. One-sixth of the country is covered with the stuff — a thick creamy simmering heap of partly decayed plant matter, slathered onto the western hills and central lowlands like gobs of rancid brown butter.
Not much useful will grow on it. You need a good pair of rubber boots to walk across it. But in a country with almost no coal and few trees, peat (or turf as the Irish call it) has one great advantage: Cut into chunks and properly dried it will burn, with a coolish but fragrant flame. The smell of a turf fire is as uniquely Irish as the taste of Guinness, and the mere memory of that sweet aroma is enough to make any Irish émigré long for home.
In effect, a peat bog is a poorly functioning compost heap. The compost heap at the back of your garden turns recognizable plants into a uniform brown humus that is perfect for digging back into the soil. To do its job properly, the heap must be neither to dry nor too wet. Unbalanced, the heap stagnates, plants do not fully decompose, and the whole thing becomes a sour smelly mess.
A hard-scrabble existence
As a compost heap, the Irish bog is too wet. The mass of decaying plant life is supersaturated with water. Microscopic organisms that are the agents of decomposition are aerobic; that is, they depend on oxygen. But oxygen is not very soluble in water, and in stagnant water, as in the bog, the supply of oxygen is soon depleted. Decomposition comes to a screeching halt.
Plants that grow on the surface of the bog cannot, like normal plants, get their nutrients from the soil. The layer of peat below is water-logged, dank, and dead. Instead, bog plants survive on whatever meager supply of minerals comes with the wind and rain. It is a hard-scrabble sort of existence, not unlike that of the impoverished Irish people of yesteryear who were forced by burgeoning population and unscrupulous landlords to eke their living from the bog.
Still, for the amateur naturalist who is willing to get down on his knees, the community of bog flora is rich enough. Not least among these resourceful leprechaun plants are the insectivores, including blanderworts, butterworts, sundews, and pitcher plants, plants that trap and digest whatever unwary bugs light upon their surface. My favorite is the butterwort of counties Cork and Kerry, with its delicate violet blossom held aloft on a thin stem and sticky yellow leaves covered (if the plant is lucky) with the tiny carcasses of flies.
Of such plants the bog grows, ever upward on the partly decomposed residue of previous generations, as long as the ground remains poorly drained and soaking wet.
Ireland’s peat has accumulated for thousands of years, since the end of the last ice age. In places, the peat is 10 feet thick and there’s plenty to cut. In the flat bogs of the central plains the cutting is done by huge machines operated by Bord na Móna, the government agency empowered to harvest the peat and turn it into fuel suitable for the generation of electricity. In the western hills the harvesting is done by hand with a spade called a slane, whose shape is as particular to a county as the inhabitants’ accent. When on occasion I’ve been made the recipient of a modest supply of that sweet brown gunk from the hill, I’ve counted myself lucky.
Ireland’s history is buried in the bog. Because of the non-decomposing conditions of the soil, whatever gets buried is beautifully preserved. Pollen, twigs, tree trunks, bones, and antlers are maintained in the peat in recognizable form, enabling naturalists and climatologists to reconstruct past climates, flora, and fauna with remarkable completeness. Human history, too, is in the bog. Dwelling places, timber trackways, tubs of butter, even clothed bodies are yielded by the peat for study by archeologists. Most remarkable of all are the troves of ecclesiastical treasure — jeweled chalices and other liturgical artifacts of wood and metal — buried in the bog a thousand years ago, perhaps in nervous anticipation of a Viking raid, and not recovered until our own time.
In a rapidly eroding bog on a shoulder of Mt. Brandon, near Dingle, at the places where the blanket of turf has been cut away by wind, one can find hundreds of carefully sharpened spikes of yew wood, about a foot long, lying helter-skelter on the exposed stony surface of the mountain. Archeologists are uncertain of the origin or purpose of the spikes, which as far as I know occur nowhere else. Local tradition ascribes the “arrows” to an epic battle between the champions of the provinces of Ulster and Munster in the days of myth and legend, and indeed the townland in which they are found is called Com an Áir, or Valley of the Slaughter.
A time before history
There is a place in the bog where erosion had exposed dozens of the spikes in situ, aligned in a mass, all pointing upwards and tipped in the same direction, their bases jammed into an ancient surface of the bog. My guess is that the curious artifacts were used by hunters, to lame animals driven toward the mat of spikes.
This summer I came across a neat bundle of the sharpened sticks protruding from a vertical surface of the eroded bog where a prehistoric hunter laid them down, thousands of years ago, and then apparently forgot them. The bog grew up to cover the lost bundle, eventually with more than four feet of turf. Then the balance of wind and rain somehow changed, and erosion began to cut the turf away, revealing at last a perfectly preserved glimpse of human fallibility at a time before history.
