I decide to take the first walk on my own.
I enter Lenzie Moss at Fern Avenue on an astonishingly sunny Friday afternoon. The air is thick with seeds, floating like the toxic spores in Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Small white butterflies flit about the hawthorn, which is in resplendent bloom like I have never seen before. Robbins, blackbirds and willow warblers sing out in celebration of this abundance. It catches me by surprise, and I take it all in for a moment, enjoying the sun on my skin and the rarity of an encounter with so much concentrated life. I instinctively reach for my phone to take my first photograph, hoping to capture the motion of the springtime air. Looking back at the image, there is little sense of this snow globe effect, but later I see the seeds gathered in the birch branches, snagged like sheep wool on a wire fence.
Someone walks towards me, and I snap out of it, feeling a little embarrassed to be caught inhaling and grinning so unusually. I nod a greeting without making eye contact then realise it is my next-door neighbour, Nalini. Without stopping to chat, we continue along the path in opposite directions. I regret missing the opportunity to tell someone what I am doing but take this as a sign that I should ask her to join me for the next walk. Although I moved to Lenzie with my children two years ago, I have not managed to connect to the local community as much as I had hoped. This is for various reasons, all of which could be surmounted if I was more proactive. I am sure that the idea for this project was partly a response to that sense of disconnection. Issuing an invitation for 100 people (well, 99 if this one is discounted) to walk this route with me over the next few years will allow me to meet many whom I would not otherwise have had a chance to know. And for the small number of people I have already met, I will surely find out something more about them, and what this place means to them.
Today, the bog is severely depleted. Previously saturated areas off the main pathway have dried out over the last few weeks of hot weather and it would be possible – but inadvisable – to step down onto areas I had never previously been able to enter. The ground is crisp and cracked, the waterways reduced to grooves in the brittle mud. Recently, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency warned that Scotland is on track for a summer drought as a lack of rain has brought groundwater levels low. Here, the change in the landscape is a palpable reminder of the fragility of the peat bog, an ecosystem that is facing severe threats in the Anthropocene. I consider how the decline of this place not only poses significant environmental risks – impacting carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and flood management – but also threatens the cultural value of the Moss, which is an archive of past human activities, and a vital part of the town’s sense of itself. I pass by dogwalkers, school children, drunks and joggers, and wonder what each of them could tell me about this storied land.
The parched earth is not the only sign of precarity. Along the birchwood pathway to the north of the site, I pass countless snapped branches and fallen trees. At first, I assume that this is due to the extensive damage caused by Storm Éowyn a few months ago. I am sure that this is the case for some of them, as my garden can attest. However, the breaks seem too methodical, too regular to be caused by a natural phenomenon. I recall mention of conservation work by the rangers who manage this site and suspect that the branches have been felled to create natural barriers to prevent access to the recovering bog and encourage its regeneration. This theory is supported by the rough wattle fences bordering the previously open marshland, and the signs that I saw a few weeks ago discouraging walkers from leaving the main pathway.
I turn left onto the boardwalk that affords passage over the western edge of the Moss, which is the only section without a woodland perimeter. Open blue skies, crossed by vapour trails and stretching out to the Campsie hills to the north. Crows congregate among the heather and gulls fly high overhead. The sound of a passing train cuts through the quiet, travelling between Glasgow and Stirling or Edinburgh. Peering through the gaps in the trees, I watch it pass. I suppose that most of the passengers are commuters on their way home a little early at the end of a busy week. Do they know that this place exists? Do they have any sense of it as the grey of the city gives way to the blurred green of the woodland bordering the railway line? The Moss keeps its secrets.
When the rail route was built, it cut unsympathetically through the peatland, separating the Gadloch – the standing freshwater to the south of the town – from the woodland and the raised bog now known as Lenzie Moss. The railway now eclipses the industrial history of this place, but there are countless traces of older journeys and inhabitations. On the other side of the path, a ruined building is set back in the undergrowth, but largely visible to those who notice. The outline of the building is intact with knee-high stone walls demarking a central space, along with two smaller rooms. It doesn’t look big enough for a dwelling, so given its proximity to the railway, it must have had some industrial function. Maybe they stored tools or machinery for peat extraction. At any rate, it has since been left to crumble. The tops of the walls are covered in grass and plants have lodged in the cracks between the stones. I step over a barrier of green and up onto the structure. Balancing cautiously, I walk along the walls. It seems as though history has a scent here: a damp, earthy residue left by hard-working men loading carts and stacking fuel.
As I approach the end of the circle and make to turn off the pathway, I am surprised to hear my name called out. It is my upstairs neighbour, Shirley, with her bike and two cycling children in tow. At the end of a long day spent outside at school and nursery, the little ones are tired and irritable, and the enthusiastic greeting that I am accustomed to is not forthcoming. I join them for the last leg nevertheless and with one child up ahead and the other trailing behind, we talk of the cloying heat, the benefits of outdoor learning, and the beauty of this place. I correct my earlier mistake by telling Shirley all about this project, inviting her to join me for one of my walks, and we talk about ways to reach out into the community.
It seems fitting that I started this walk on my own and ended it in company. I hope that this is a model for the whole project, and I resolve to mark the 100th walk (whensoever that might be) by inviting all the people who have ever accompanied me to come together in a group journey; a celebration of the many lives and stories that circle the Moss.
