Author: robinacrawford

Sphagnum mosses can absorb 20 times their own weight in water…or blood.

In Ness on the Island of Lewis they commemorate the fallen with a poppy outside each croft where a man did not return from the First World War. Often there is more than one. Sometimes there is now no longer a croft. Because of its absorbent qualities sphagnum moss from the peatlands was used for bandages.

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On the peat-lined foreshore of the Thames hangs Turner’s ‘Peat Bog, Scotland c.1808‘. The Napoleonic Wars had prevented him from sailing to the continent and so he travelled north for inspiration.

On the gridded streets of New York, laid out like newly cut peat slabs on the moor, this weekend exiled Scots and those of Scottish heritage whose ancestors were forced overseas by clearance, famine, poverty and Hope celebrate Tartan Week by the Hudson.

Peat Bog, Scotland 1812 Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851 Presented by A. Acland Allen through the Art Fund 1925 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/A01000

By early August the May cut peat slabs have dried enough to be gathered up into little pyramid stacks, rudhan. I surprised a little wren walking down the rathad an isein, the bird’s road, which in turn startled me- it was paler and less peaty coloured than the wren that comes to my (un-boggy) Fife garden. As it popped into the refuge offered by the peats, a temporary man-made place of shelter on the summer moor, rudhan became sheiling. 

On the #peatlands the small gap left between the edge of the bank and the first slab of cut peat is known as the ” bird’s road”, “the little bird’s road” or Agnes said “lamb’s road.” See http://www.annecampbellart.co.uk  and available @ComunnNis and  @anlanntair

The fascinating world of commercial peat extraction.

On #TweedDay some Hebridean peat stack sketches on the herring bone tweed cover of my notebook.

The peat holds onto the memory of those who transitorily pass over its surface- deer, pheasants, dogs, people- at least transitorily.