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Little bear lost in the (un)wood. Handsel and Gretel are cold and in fuel poverty when they come upon the witch’s cottage.

Peat stack house copyright http://www.peateater.com

At the OAP’s Thursday lunch club in Ness on the island of Lewis (18 women, one man) I was joyfully told this story. John Nicolson (the one man) tried to get exemption from war service in 1944/5 when he turned 18. He was sent to Edinburgh to go in front of a committee of officers and civilians to plead his case. When he told them he was only able man left in his township and was needed for croft work and peat cutting the chairman of committee said to him “I’ve been to the Western Isles and seen the men leaning with their elbows on the dyke smoking their pipes and looking on whilst the women did all the hard work…off to the army with you!”

“I was not at all ill pleased to have to come again through that awful Glencoe. If it had been tremendous on the previous day, yesterday it was perfectly horrific….We went on to the [Inverouran] inn- the wild man galloping on first, to get a fire lighted- and there we dined on eggs and bacon, oat-cake, and whiskey [sic]: and changed and dried ourselves. The place was a mere knot of little outhouses, and in one of these there were fifty highlanders all drunk….Some were drovers, some pipers, and some were driven in by stress of weather. One was a paper-hanger. He had come out three days before to paper the inn’s best room, a chamber almost large enough to keep a Newfoundland dog in; and, from the first half hour after his arrival to that moment, had been hopelessly and irreconcilably drunk. They were lying about in all directions: on forms, on the ground, about a loft overhead, round the turf-fire wrapped in plaids, on the tables, and under them….”

Charles Dickens

Quoted in ‘The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens’ edited by Jenny Hartley. Oxford. 2012.

image: http://www.dickensfellowship.org/dickens-journalist

The peat stacked in the garden centre has an interesting use of language. ‘Reduced’ can be up to 90% peat. This product is used by ‘Professionals’.

Peat forms at about 1mm per year. This slug on Flanders Moss can travel up to 0.03 mph.

By 2026 this peat bog will cease to be cut and an ancient human tradition will be gone.

Enjoy whatever you read this #WorldBookDay

It’s weel kent that the fairyfolk will misuse any spade left lying out on the moor so what better place to keep your peat iron safe than in a camoflaged wheelie bin?