Ada is the first person I have walked with for this project who has never visited Lenzie before. In fact, she is relatively new to Scotland, having spent most of her life in Michigan. After a year in St Andrews to complete her Master’s degree in social anthropology, Ada moved to Glasgow at the start of this year to begin a PhD at the University of Glasgow, supervised by Professor Jill Robbie, who walked with me last week. Her project explores the role and function of law in the Anthropocene – our current, contested geological epoch, in which human activity has changed the planet. The focus is, of course, peatlands (Ada says that she didn’t know anything about law or peatlands before she started her doctoral research and I am impressed by her willingness to embrace the unknown). I have never met Ada before, although we have been in touch by email. I am keen to know what impression this place makes on her.
We meet at the station on a sunny Thursday afternoon. Lenzie feels quiet and lazy now, without the usual traffic of children on their way home from school. This is how the summer holidays are supposed to be. After we have picked each other out from the small crowd leaving the train here, we wander slowly through the car park to join the Moss. We soon find a shared interest in creative methods for place-based research. Ada tells me about a reading group that she led, which worked only with chapters of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass. I admit that a copy sits unfinished on my shelf, and I resolve to go back to it. Ada reminds me of Kimmerer’s argument that any efforts to restore land without also restoring our relationship to land are wasted. As we walk up Bea’s Path, I enjoy nurturing a new relationship with the Moss, and I can’t help but fall into tour guide mode – pointing out the things that I have learnt about on previous walks.
As we reach the end of the birchwood, we pass a septuagenarian walking group, beaming in baseball caps and striped t-shirts. People seem happy here today and there is a carefree quality brought about by the weather and the time of year. The Moss is looking its best. Ada tells me that it took her quite a long time to adjust to the Scottish weather (despite the severity of Michigan winters). She recalls a moment when something shifted. Out trail running in the Fife hills, the landscape opened up before her, with the city of Edinburgh in the distance, and the idea of living here suddenly seemed possible. We talk about the lessons that the natural environment has for us. We share a wish to be affected by the world, to adapt and adjust according to what our surroundings are telling us. What are the lessons of the bog? We agree that they are about transition, queerness, layers and time.
Ada talks about the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene as stepping into ‘a moment of uncertainty’. While we stick to the main path, I think about my recent experience of walking across the bog – tentatively stretching out a foot, placing it down somewhere that seems like it might hold, transferring weight. We are moving through metaphors. We talk about bogs as transitional places and I tell Ada about a performance I attended here last year, in which three contemporary artists, Belladonna Paloma, Oren Shoesmith and Rabindranath X Bhose (who refer to themselves as a ‘boggy trans crip collective’) took an audience on a journey round the Moss, exploring the connections between trans bodies and boglands. I hope to walk with one of the group as part of this project and will reach out to them soon. As we walk, we also note the subtle public artworks – the ‘stacks’ by Toby Paterson, Dug Macleod and Simon Whatley. Ada immediately recognises the shape of peat stacks in these sculptures, which are positioned as way markers at points where pathways come together, also providing resting places for those who might need them.
On the boardwalk, we look out to the Campsie Fells and pause to take in this place. We are joined by a flock of stonechats – flashes of white, orange and black dancing about the heather. I ask Ada what she makes of it. She is struck by how far away it feels from Glasgow. She notes the lack of trees (something she misses from home). But she is taken by this place, and shares that the proximity of a mysterious wild place to the city that she now calls her home is reassuring. Urban Glasgow feels like the centre of the world to Ada at the moment and she values being able to move to the periphery so easily. We watch a train speed by to the east as we walk back to the station. In a matter of minutes, Ada will be travelling in the other direction.
When I walked with Paul earlier, he had expressed an aspiration to connect with people beyond the town, to engage new visitors with the Moss. I think he would approve of my project achieving this already, in its own small way. Ada and I take up the other part of that earlier conversation: the challenge of connecting local people with the peatlands, of healing the land by nurturing the relationships that comprise it. We discuss artistic methods – poetry, art, creative writing. We imagine a community arts event that invites people to come together in recognition and celebration of the diverse perspectives and experiences of the Moss. Then we walk along to the station, and I see Ada onto the train and watch it depart, carrying her back to the city again after her brief visit to an older, slower place. I am very grateful that she has taken the time to come and meet me here and I hope that we will stay in touch. It will be fascinating to find out where else her research will take her.
Later, I seek out my copy of Braiding Sweetgrass and find the relevant section on page 338:
Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth.
