Into the Peatlands: A Journey Through the Moorland Year
Robin A. Crawford
Birlinn, £12.99
Review by Nick Major
Rannoch Moor must be one of the scariest places in Scotland. In Robert
Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, Davey Balfour almost meets his death
fleeing across this trackless expanse of bogs and lochans. As Robert
McFarlane has pointed out, this is partly why it has a ‘reputation for
hostility’. Robin Crawford, in this new book on peatlands, describes
Rannoch’s ‘predominant colours’ as ‘those of the dead: the withered
straw of the Racomitrium grass; the brown of the heather; the
grey-white of the crottal- and lichen-covered glacial granite
boulders.’ It is no coincidence that Crawford follows his chapter on
Rannoch with one called The Supernatural Moor. In Scottish folk
stories, moorlands are eerie liminal places, home to faeries, bog
people and will-o’-the-wisps, the sort of tricksters who lead the
gullible to their doom.
Peatlands also have a more life-preserving and practical role in
Scottish culture. Pay a visit to Ness on the Isle of Lewis in
midsummer and you might see huge herringbone structures of peat in
residents’ back gardens. Crawford takes this as evidence that ‘the
ways first established in the ancient transhumance culture are still
being practised in the twenty-first century.’ This crofting culture
saw families divide their time between winter on the croft and summer
out on the moorland, where their cattle and sheep would pasture whilst
the children would dance gaily around the shielings.
Crawford is a romantic who idealises the crofting life of old. It
takes him a good one hundred pages to admit its brutal reality. In the
winter, crofters often lived cheek by jowl with their cows in
blackhouses. These small stone structures were heated with a central
fire. Peat is a notoriously smoky fuel, hence its use in whisky
production. ‘Living in smoke-filled accommodation shared with
livestock and no running water saw high infant mortality, many mothers
dying in childbirth, or fatalities from TB, whooping cough, scarlet
fever and measles.’ Oh, for a return to the old ways!
In all seriousness, this is one of many flaws in Crawford’s book. Into
the Peatlands is arranged around the four seasons, but this only works
when Crawford is writing about the traditional practise of cutting,
drying and burning peat. He has to fit his other, loosely-related
topics around this, which makes for a more haphazard structure. Also,
one senses that Crawford knows there is only so much that can be
written about peat.
Perhaps that’s why there’s a long arduous section on ‘transporting the
peats’ or a paragraph on a notorious crime of passion that has only a
tenuous relation to peat: the poor victim only happened to be standing
next to a peat stack when she was shot. With this in mind, it is odd
that Crawford should neglect to mention Seamus Heaney. Any book on
bogs that includes an extract from a DEFRA report but nothing from
Heaney’s pen is not going to win many prizes.
All this is not to say Crawford’s principal subject is mundane. If it
was, 13 per cent of Scotland’s landmass would have to described as
incalculably boring. On the contrary, one of peat’s many fascinating
qualities is its capacity for preserving whatever is sucked into its
morass. The Tollund Man, a fellow from the 4th Century BC, was found
perfectly mummified in a Danish bog in 1950. (Heaney, by the way,
wrote a poem about him). As Crawford points out, peatlands are natural
time capsules. Scientists can use the preserved flora and fauna to
recreate models of the landscape going back 10,000 years.
Nuggets of information like this, and Crawford’s unbounded
enthusiasm, prevent Into the Peatlands from becoming tedious. There
are also some lucid sections on how lowland moors were subject to
erasure with the advances of industrial agriculture. One of the more
uplifting stories here concerns Advocate and philosopher Lord Kames.
In the aftermath of the failed Jacobite uprising, Kames offered
displaced Highland clansmen land on Blairdrummond Moss, near Stirling.
Giving the Highlanders permission to clear peatland and establish
agricultural production allowed them ‘entry into mainstream European
civic society, even if it was at the very bottom – and he did so on
what were better terms than they had previously enjoyed, even in their
clan lands.’ In chapters like this, Crawford conveys a vital truth:
that a sophisticated knowledge of peatlands is crucial if we are to
understand the complex relationship between people and place.
On the whole, however, this book is a wayward attempt to tackle a
difficult subject. There is also a predominance of sloppy writing:
countless examples of fudged sentences, inconsistencies of style, and
platitudes about Scotland. Take this, where Crawford discusses the
declivities between the Highlander and Lowlander. ‘The “Lowlander” can
be Scot, Roman, Viking or Englander, but suppression of the Highlander
is always the aim. It is naïve to think that this no longer goes on
today, sometimes consciously, but mostly unthinkingly. We Scots are
children of a fractured history, victims of bullying who can ourselves
bully those even gentler than ourselves.” Putting the prose to one
side, surely Scotland has moved on from this kind of useless
self-victimisation?
The publisher, Birlinn, has for a long time been producing beautifully
designed books full of nuanced and intelligent writing. Into the
Peatlands has the design. It is elegant and contains some fine
illustrations, but the writing falters too often. This is a shame,
especially as one senses there is a truly excellent book here, waiting
to emerge from within its own pages.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here