“In digging a drain through this moss, my servants found, at the depth of about four feet from the surface, a number of ancient Roman silver medals, in great preservation.”

Among the coins, appropriately enough, some bearing the image of Ceres, the Goddess of Agriculture with stalks of corn in one hand and flaming torch in the other.

 

Model of a peat pressing machine made for The Highland Society by James Slight, Edinburgh, 1832. National Museum of Rural Life, East Kilbride.

Inside the box of peaty treasures: glacial clay laid down in the ice age from under bogs- grey coloured(Stirling) and red(the Borders); commercially machine cut peat from Aberdeenshire; hand cut domestic peat from the Western Isles and Caithness; hand woven bog grasses; thousand year old silver birch and snail shells preserved in peat; tinder fungus from lagg fen trees; moorland owl pellets; a song thrush’s nest…

From ‘Old Lawnmowers’ to ‘Railway Presevation’, ‘Peat and Peat Cutting’ is just one of the many brilliant titles the admirable @ShireBooks have been publishing since 1962.

The bird-feasting season between Thanksgiving and Christmas seems to be generating a lot of twittering and grousing. When subsistence living on the North Atlantic peatlands all birds have traditionally been game.

I was chatting to a man at a BookWeekScotland event who told me a story of whisky galore. When he was a boy it was discovered that a pipe high up in the rafters of the local distillery had twenty four neat little holes drilled in it. Each was cunningly bunged with chewing gum and impossible to see without close inspection. Subsequently police and excise officers raided many a house in and around the Speyside village early one morning.

Once things had settled down his father took him for a stroll on a moonless night. First they passed through fields of barley then headed uphill till they came to the open moor. Either he pulled too hard or the suction was too strong but when retrieving a bottle from the bog in which it was hidden the string slipped from round the neck and the whisky was accidentally sacrificed, reclaimed by the peaty waters from which it came.

“…Oan ilka St.Andrew’s Day he maks a feast,/An’ drinks yer health twalve times or mair at least…”

From a poem in praise of James Carnegie, my great, great, great grandfather. Happy St.AndrewsDay!

Peaty Water- a witty poetic gem from the creator of ‘Whisky Galore’.

Bog myrtle soap. Bog myrtle has excellent restorative properties, traditionally used as a whisky hangover cure.

Homage to @KimKardashian posing in just glitter, this dull Scottish man is posing in just peat…and my skin feels so smooth now.