Ellie is sitting outside Billington’s with her partner and one-year-old daughter when I meet her for our walk. They are visiting from their home in the Scottish borders and haven’t been to Lenzie before. I have spoken with Ellie online and exchanged a few emails over the years, but this is the first time that we have met in person. Ellie is an artist, currently working in Scotland’s temperate rainforests – the ancient woodlands of the west coast. She makes sound recordings, films, photographs and sculptures, which respond to the textures and changes in different landscapes. Ellie is interested in questions about time and has been particularly drawn to the microworlds of lichen and bryophytes. She is enthusiastic about my project and the opportunity of a walk round Lenzie Moss. The plan is for the two of us to walk one way and for her family to walk the other, so at some point we will meet.

As we set off, I tell Ellie about an awful mistake that I made earlier. I had arranged a walk with someone else at the start of the day. Somehow, I had neglected to add this to my calendar, and it had completely slipped my mind. Later, when I checked my computer, I had received a couple of emails, ‘I’m here in the station car park’, then ‘I’m going to head off now’. They had driven quite far to meet me. Feeling terrible, I replied with a huge apology and expressed my hope that we still might be able to arrange a walk. I will completely understand if they decide against it now. For me, this project is about making time for people and taking a careful and ethical approach to walking and talking. I tell Ellie that I am upset with myself for having compromised these principles and wasted somebody’s time like this.

Ellie says all the right things, and we talk about our varied experiences of walking interviews, which both of us see as an important part of our creative practice. Ellie is studying for a PhD at Edinburgh College of Art. She is researching the different timescales of the forests where she works and searching for appropriate artistic responses to these complex places. She talks about the challenge of artists being ‘parachuted’ into a new site and the slow, sensitive time that it takes to make connections with the people who live and work there, before any artwork can be made. I recognise this from previous projects but realise that this one at Lenzie Moss has been quite different because I am part of the same community as many of the people I am walking with. For Ellie, there are more barriers and a greater distance to bridge before she feels ready to create artworks at her chosen sites. She is therefore conducting many interviews with people who know and understand the forest. Ellie records and transcribes her conversations as part of her research process. I tell her that I rely on written notes and memory, which inevitably means that I will miss or forget some things.

We look closely at the trees as we walk and Ellie regrets leaving her magnifying lens behind. Nevertheless, we attend to the intricate patterns of the lichen and identify Xanthoria parietina, commonly known as common orange or golden shield. I know very little about lichens, beyond the fact that they form through a symbiotic partnership between fungi and algae. Ellie tells me about the lichens and liverworts that she has encountered in her fieldwork. They are key indicator species whose presence suggests that you are likely within temperate rainforest. The location, age and diversity of lichen can tell us a lot about an ecosystem’s health and resilience. Because of Ellie’s interest in the temporalities of her field sites, she has been drawn to lichen after her initial interest in rhododendron and ash trees, as they require close attention and slow, mindful observation. The problem, which Ellie is now grappling with, is that institutional time is something quite different and she feels under pressure from the university to move from observing and learning to making and creating.

As we walk down the boardwalk, Ellie spots her partner and daughter coming the other way. We stop and chat for a while. They are interested in community ownership, and they mention Leadburn Community Woodland between Edinburgh and Peebles, a former conifer plantation that was purchased from Forestry Scotland in 2007. I wonder whether Lenzie Moss could ever be owned and managed by the community, and what benefits that might afford. On previous walks, I have heard about and gained an insight into the disconnect between the Moss and some local people, and the challenges of community perception of council management. Perhaps a different model of ownership would make a positive difference in this regard, encouraging more engagement and creating a greater sense of agency.

The two pairs continue in opposite directions, and Ellie and I turn off the boardwalk onto the path across the bog. We spend some time in the middle of the site, conscious of the exposed peat and the need to tread carefully. We stop to examine the healthy carpet of sphagnum moss and watch the cottongrass dancing in the breeze. When we look up, Ellie spots two deer running along the central raised area that used to be an internal railway line. Their white tails are easy to spot but otherwise they are well camouflaged against the heather.

Our route back to the town takes us through the south-east section of woodland and we see various fungi and lichen clinging to the birch trees. We walk slowly and lean into slower timescales. This puts us in a reflective mood, and we wonder about the role that artists can have in places like this. Ellie says that we are conduits between experts, publics and places, and she believes that site-based art can help people think differently about their environments. But for Ellie, it is so important for us to spend time learning, listening and getting to know the places where we work. She wonders what language she can use to argue for this as an essential part of a creative process. She also says that it is important for artists to understand what people want from them. I suppose the very bare minimum would be to turn up on time and not forget an appointment. From there, we can build towards a shared sense of belonging, a sensitive relationship with the environment, and artworks that really mean something to the people we meet, and matter to the places we visit.

Oct 18, 2025

Alison grew up in Lenzie in the 1970s and 80s. She went to school on the old site of Lenzie Moss Primary, which is now the playground for the new, larger school. It was said that the building sank a little into the bog each year.

Alison takes me to this place at the start of our walk. There are high fences around the perimeter now, which she says weren’t there before. At break times, the children were allowed to play on the Moss unsupervised. The school was connected to the bog by well-trodden pathways through the grassland. There were large holes in the ground – most likely created for the removal of peat – which the children would climb into. They felt surrounded by and connected to wildness. Alison says that she feels lucky to have had so much freedom growing up.

It is the first day of the October school holidays. Some young children cycle along Bea’s Path with their parents close behind, but it is generally quiet today. There is a gentle breeze whipping up fallen birch leaves into a perfect autumnal sky. We see a heron flying close overhead and a flock of geese passing far above. A gentle light draws us through the woods towards the peatlands. We pass a couple of teenage boys, lost in conversation.

The Moss was the backdrop to Alison’s teenage years, too. She and her friends would head up the ‘peat hill’ at the far side of the bog. The youth of Lenzie would meet up there to play and hang out. Everybody knew the spot. Their parents didn’t know where they were or what they were doing, but back then people were much more relaxed about their children’s whereabouts. I recall my own childhood days spent in the woodland near our village and I have to admit that I wouldn’t feel comfortable if my own children were to do the same. These wild, unruly landscapes are appropriate settings for rule breaking and risk taking.

Many of the houses that border the Moss were built in the years after Alison had left Lenzie. Some of them now stand on areas that she remembers as woodland, thick with blaeberry bushes. There are more established pathways and new ways onto the site. It is strange to realise that many of the features that have become waymarkers for me as I walk round the Moss – the cul-de-sac on Heather Drive, the pathway by my house, the boardwalk – were not there fifty years ago. Alison welcomes these developments to the extent that she is supportive of enhanced access to the site. At the same time, she feels a sense of loss, as the Moss is no longer as wild and unknowable as it was before.

Alison moved away to spend her student days in Edinburgh (where her daughter is now studying). After living elsewhere for some time, and after becoming a parent, she moved back to the area to be close to family. In the intervening years, a lot has changed. We approach the peat hill, and Alison observes that it is not much of a hill anymore. She wonders whether it seemed so much bigger and steeper because she was so much smaller, and that memory might have added a few feet. But we both think it more likely that erosion and peat extraction have flattened what was once a much higher area. Alison remembers fires burning here and thinks that some were set on purpose. I tell Alison something that Kay told me: that this hill was used for musket training in the 1700s. Surely, presuming that is true, this was a much more pronounced feature of the landscape.

We walk to the top of the hill – or perhaps it should now be called a mound or a knoll – to look out over the bog. I have never done this before and despite it only being a slight elevation, this position still offers a new vantage point. We can see a peaty, stagnant pool at the bottom of the slope, and beyond it is the open space of the mire. Alison remembers the ditches and the raised baulks that cut across the site in the years before she left Lenzie. Around the same time that she moved back, the large-scale restoration work took place, which Jackie told me involved in-filling these hollows and levelling the landscape. Alison had not noticed this reprofiling of the Moss before now.

At the bottom of the boardwalk, we turn onto the path across the bog. It has been raining a lot this month, so the ground is muddy and holds so much water that it springs under foot. Alison says you haven’t really visited a bog if you don’t get filthy or lose a boot. She remembers trudging home with mud-soaked socks. Thankfully, this doesn’t happen today, but we do tempt fate by following the raised path into the middle of the bog. When we get there, we stand still for a while amongst the sphagnum and the bog cotton. The wind hurries along a single meadow pipet, rising and falling through the air. Sunlight shifts across the Campsie hills to the north and Alison plans her next hike.

We enjoy the feeling of remoteness despite our proximity to the city. Looking to the southwest, there is a clear view of the high-rise flats in Springburn, marking the edge of the Glasgow conurbation. As we look out across this varied landscape, it strikes me that on these many walks that I am taking round the Moss, I have rarely stopped and taken it all in like this – felt the wind on my face, allowed my gaze to travel out into the distance, and revelled in the calm and quiet that this place offers so much of. While a lot might have changed here, I imagine that this feeling has persisted over the decades. It must have been very special growing up here, and I am happy that my own children will have this experience as well.

Oct 10, 2025

As landscapes, bogs embrace ambiguity and edges, the sensibilities that come with changing perspectives. They hold their multitudes within them, at a distance to anyone who affords them a glance. (Alys Fowler, Peatlands)

Ali is halfway through a PhD in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh, where they are writing poetry about peatlands, disability and queerness. Ali lives in Glasgow and has visited Lenzie Moss before, so it is easy for them to hop on a train at the start of the working week and meet me for a walk. I am grateful for the opportunity to think more about the unruliness and complexity of boggy places, and to learn about human positionalities in the landscape – how we might exist differently here. A few months ago, I walked with another PhD student, Ada, and we talked about creative methods and queer ecologies. I am looking forward to continuing a journey into other ways of knowing and being with the bog.

I meet Ali off the train from Glasgow on an overcast Monday morning. Relatively new to Scotland, Ali studied English literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, before they moved to Glasgow in 2022. Ali says that they are surprised by how suddenly Autumns start here. This feels particularly true after Storm Amy visited at the weekend: there are now fallen branches at every turn, and the countless dog walkers who we meet are dressed to weather the wind and the mud. Ali and I are well prepared in our waterproof jackets and boots. The sky and the land are showing us how unruly and complex they can be, but we are here to meet with the Moss on its own terms.

Ali talks about the challenges that bogs present to cultural and economic ways of valuing places, and also to scientific study and understanding. They say that bogs are disregarded places. Perhaps this is why some queer artists and writers have been drawn towards peatlands. Alys Fowler’s recently published book on Peatlands makes this point when she argues that neither peatlands nor queer people are easy to categorise, but both ‘are here, persisting’ despite attempts at erasure. Ali’s poetry responds to this complexity, and they say that they don’t have a research question as such, more a web of interconnecting themes. These include the connections between queerness and bogs, as well as the experience of disabled bodies in the landscape – the ‘natural’ condition of bodily pain and the category-defying quality of wetlands. This sounds like rich territory for creative writing, and I wonder what kind of poetry emerges from all these ideas and concerns.

Our conversation takes us as far as the north-west corner of the Moss before we begin to consciously attend to the landscape that we are walking through. Here, we encounter a quick succession of dogs and walkers. I assume that it is an organised group walk, but when I ask an elderly couple at the end of the line, I realise that it is actually more of a dog traffic jam! The Moss is very busy today, despite the rain.

So far, we have stayed on the main path. But Ali tells me of their previous visit, when they came here with a friend. The two wanted to know the bog better. They walked into the middle of the Moss, following the raised bank that cuts across the peatland. At a suitably boggy place, they shared apples with the peat, noting the different metabolisms of centuries-old mire and decades-old human visitors. As we approach the boardwalk, the site reveals more of itself to us, and we look out into its centre. Or rather, shrouded in cloud and dulled by drizzle, I sense that something is being withheld.

At the far end of the boardwalk, we see a crowd making their way towards us. A lively terrier leads the pack. My short-sightedness means I have to look twice before I realise that the line of small, colourful bodies that follow are not even more dogs, they are in fact a nursery class on an outing. We wait for them to pass by. I am confident enough in my waterproof trousers to perch on a bench, but Ali stands and looks out across the heather. We chat to some of the excited three-year-olds, who are clearly unbothered by the rain.

We loop back towards the train station and pass the concrete platform, hidden in the south-east birchwood. This is the place that nine-year old Willow referred to as ‘the bottom of a castle’. Today, we see its potential as a stage for performance. We imagine an event that would lead people into the woods to find a performer in this clearing. Words could be woven together with the wind and the water; new relationships could be enacted; an ecological theatre could be created. Ali says that they think about performance as a way of ‘creating difficulty’ and working through it. This resonates with my work in theatre, and I am intrigued by this framing of an artform that I know well in terms of complexity and challenge.

As I leave Ali on the platform to wait for their train, they remember that they brought something for me. They hand me an A4 sheet of paper. It is a poem. It is called ‘Without rush, with rushes’, and it is written in a verse form that matches its characters with the chemical formula for tannic acid, formed as hydrogen ions are released by sphagnum moss.

In the poem, the bog is difficult to pin down. At ‘the city’s muck-edge’, the wetlands are more than a metaphor for an exhausted body in a hospital bed. When ‘a breath enters a stomata / on a sprig of bog cotton’, that exhalation is also the speaker’s. The bog and the poet are both ‘evaporation-exerted’. But they are also ‘Resistant to / being walked on.’ The poem is full of images of the natural world: from ‘soggy metabolisms’ and ‘precipitation-originating’ mosses to ‘some astonishing bird. Beloved of the sky’. But these boggy energies also slip into everyday urban life – ‘Tiny wetlands in the subway / tracks’, and ‘grouse lying sleeping by / the skirting board of those walls’. The poet looks to ‘an outburst of trees’ in the foothills (for me, recalling the remnants of forest above the towns in the lower Campsies). In these misused landscapes, there may be few signs of growth and regeneration, but the poet feels these ‘future pasts’ somewhere else – ‘I feel it elsewise, ambiently’.

Ali and their poem have helped me to encounter the bog, elsewise. While we didn’t stray far off the main path today, I am reminded of the value of making transgressive routes through a changing landscape. I think that poets are often the best people to point us in these new directions.

Oct 6, 2025