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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.

In this display case in the National Museum in Edinburgh are Bronze and Iron Age objects traded between Scotland and Europe. On the the middle shelf are axeheads, chisels, a hammer and some razor-like blades with whet stones for sharpening them. They belonged to a woodworker, possibly a boat builder. There are also beads of gold, glass and Baltic amber dating to the 7th century BC. Discovered by Donald Murray in May 1910 when cutting his peat at Adabrock at the north tip of the Island of Lewis.

Domestic bliss on the #peatlands