I meet Paul Dudman outside Billington’s cafe on Kirkintilloch Road, and we enter the Moss at Heath Avenue. Paul is the chair of Friends of Lenzie Moss (FOLM), the association dedicated to conservation of the site ‘for the benefit of present and future generations’. Paul grew up in Lenzie and has memories of playing on the Moss as a child, before the boardwalk, when the paths were rough tracks through the woods and the commercial peatworks had not long ground to a halt. After living elsewhere for several years, he returned to Lenzie almost thirty years ago to start a family and gradually took on a more active role in the community. Paul is a physics teacher, now looking forward to retirement, and he devotes much of his spare time to Lenzie Moss. The group has had a huge impact in the area, not least by preventing significant housing developments from going ahead.
I have noticed how the people I have walked with so far all see different things here, as individual geographies determine diverse experiences of the site. For Jackie it is the patchwork habitats of specific flora and fauna; for Nalini it is the places and features of her children’s play. Paul’s geography is defined by ownership and rights. He points out borders and boundaries as we walk: here the Rugby Club exchanged land to allow the Local Nature Reserve to be formed; here, access to Lenzie Meadow Primary is being negotiated; here, the original open grassland adjacent to a housing estate has been rewilded and now offers a habitat for fossorial water voles. Paul tells me that the threat of housing development is constant and always returns in cycles of speculative proposals, community consultation, meetings and objections, which are usually upheld. Paul sees the voles as great allies in this battle, thanks to their protected status. He tells me that these elusive rodents may do much to prevent future development on the Moss.
Another major part of FOLM’s work is education. The organise several guided walks each year (I attended an enjoyable one last summer, when we learnt about the vole population). Members of FOLM have worked with the local primary schools, and they also maintain the information boards on the Moss. After a popular workshop for children, making Harry Potter style brooms from the birch trees that had been cut back from the bog, Paul took some of the brooms home and stored them beside his garage. Several years later, a new tree had taken root from the fallen seeds. It seems that the Moss is unwilling to be contained within the borders that we construct for it. Paul tells me that the woodland to the north of the site used to be three times the size it is now. He recalls getting lost once, with his new baby in a carrier. In the early days of mobile telephones, he was able to call his wife to tell her that he was fairly confident that he would get home, but that it might take a bit longer than planned.
Paul charts a local history of lobbying, protesting and campaigning, with groups like Save Lenzie Moss and Lenzie Flood Prevention Group taking up specific causes at different times. Sometimes these have been aligned with FOLM’s priorities and aspirations, but occasionally they have been in direct opposition. One major example of this was the proposals by some members of the community to have the entire site drained to prevent flooding in other areas of Lenzie. FOLM is far from neutral in the various debates and disagreements that play out around the edges of the site. The group is broadly aligned with the council’s agenda to protect the peatlands and while they don’t want to police use of the site, they do understand the ecological value of limiting access beyond the main pathways. They are concerned with protecting external borders and opposed to any infringement that compromises the natural habitats here. However, Paul stresses that they do not own or control the site. This is not always understood and a lot of the complaints about the way that the Moss is managed come directly to FOLM. These are invariably forwarded to the council.
Paul and I follow the main path round the Moss and we only leave the boardwalk for the briefest of moments, to admire one of the benches that FOLM have commissioned with a bequest left by a former member, David Lee. I photograph it while Paul chats to an old school friend as he cycles by. These hand-carved elmwood seats are the most conspicuous things on the site, which is no accident. Paul is against the Moss ‘becoming a park’, which is not to say that he doesn’t want people to visit, to walk and play here. Rather, that the primacy of the natural environment is vital. This means being able to walk round the site on well-maintained paths, but for the Moss to maintain its wild, unruly nature. This seems to be about upholding the integrity of Lenzie Moss, which is both a subjective idea, and a noble cause.
What kinds of wildness are permitted to exist here, and on whose terms? I am coming to realise that every corner of this place – every path and every border – is determined by people. In the peri-urban zone between Bishopbriggs and Kirkintilloch, no square meter goes unnoticed: someone owns it; someone else wants to use it. Paul points out the land by the football pitches at Boghead Wood, which is held by a private real estate company. Every decision about what happens here, and every purchase or development around the edges of the site, is hashed out in a board room somewhere, by people who have possibly never seen the meadow pipets parachuting over the heather. This is not a revelation, but it feels particularly acute here in such a small place with so many stakeholders with competing visions and agendas.
My walk with Paul has shown me a highly political place, which is largely determined by human-scale priorities and timescales. But this lesson has been gently troubled by his stories of losing his way in the woods and stowaway birch seeds. When the latest development proposals come along, I think Paul has these moments in mind. They are what matters to him. This is conservation at its best: an effort to make space for wilful forces, strange encounters, and unexpected outcomes. These are the things that are worth fighting for.
