I am walking with Kyriaki, an artist and researcher who also goes by the name of Sandy. We haven’t met before, but she got in touch after I shared this project on the mailing list for the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network – a busy and supportive community of researchers that we are both part of. Sandy is using walking methods in her own work, and she is interested to explore artistic processes and ways of doing creative research. It is a nice coincidence that I walked with Deirdre – another artist – yesterday, and we talked about the same topics (which in turn connected to the walk I did with Ellie a few weeks before). I am seeing my walk with Sandy as a continuation of those conversations, even though Sandy, Ellie and Deirdre don’t know each other.

In stark contrast to yesterday’s walk in the crisp, clear air, a thick fog has now materialised. We won’t be looking out to the Campsies on this walk, but we enjoy the otherworldly atmosphere, and we peer into the trees, which are shrouded in greyness. Sandy asks me if I always walk with other people or whether I use solo walking as a way of exploring the sites where I work. I reflect that while I sometimes enjoy walking on my own (I am currently half way through a very drawn out journey along the different stages of the John Muir Way, for example), in my research, I tend to favour shared experiences. In different ways, all my work is about bringing people together in places to collaborate and create together.

This is a timely conversation as I have just been reading an essay by another Deirdre – my old PhD supervisor Dee Heddon, whose 40 Walks blog was a key inspiration for my Lenzie Moss project. Dee reminds us that some of the early proponents of solo walking – William Hazlitt and Henry David Thoreau – in fact walked often with companions. Dee also writes of ‘the art of companioning’ and notes the etymology of that word: Companion is formed from com and pain, meaning with bread. So, companions are ‘breadfellows’, who share sustenance. Walking projects like this often feel like they are sustaining me and building relationships with people and places.

Sandy and I walk through the birchwood, and I ask her about her work. Like me, she is a multi-disciplinary artist who works at specific field sites. Her current project, which, like Ellie, is part of a PhD at Edinburgh College of Art, is an exploration of post-industrial places in Europe. At the moment, Sandy is working at two sites: Malls Mire Park in in the Toryglen district to the south of Glasgow, which includes a community woodland and gardens, along with the remnants of a wetland environment; and urban areas of the Greek city of Eleusis in the in Athens metropolitan area, where Sandy once lived. She is also interested in finding a third site in Eastern Europe.

Sandy talks about the materiality of these places and tells me about an artistic process in which she collected discarded drinks cans from the Glasgow site. These were cleaned, sand-blasted, melted and cast, using moulds made from the shapes of discarded wrappers and paper, which had been coated in wax. Sandy says that she tries to avoid making work that is ‘on the nose’, so she tends towards abstract shapes and exploratory formations. Her work sounds fascinating and I look forward to seeing these objects that have been crafted from the waste products of the places where she has worked.

While Sandy is drawn to the objects and textures of her field sites, she is also concerned with the ‘dematerialisation of art’. We talk about walking, recording, and conversing, and think with Ellie and Deirdre’s invitation to recognise the inherent value of the exploratory, meandering routes that we might take, without always driving towards a finished product or output. It seems appropriate to talk about materiality as we walk through this strange foggy landscape. Sandy says that she feels like she is in the middle of nowhere, and without the usual reference points on the horizon, I share this feeling of dislocation.

Walking down the boardwalk, I spot a glint of metal in the heather a few yards into the bog. The ground is hard enough to hold my weight, and I venture out to retrieve an energy drink can, which I empty of its contents and pass to Sandy, who is pleased to have gathered something that can be used in her artworks. Apparently, there are many more such materials at Toryglen. Sandy tells me she has turned to Google’s aggregated location data to discover that the park there is particularly busy during weekend nighttime hours. This is a reminder that Lenzie Moss, too, is used by all sorts of people at different times of the day, and that the smashed glass, discarded cans and fire pits evidence human activity that takes place long after the hours that I am typically out here.

We turn from the boardwalk and head out across the bog. Sandy asks me about the Moss, and I offer a guided tour. Once again I find myself telling the history of peat extraction and the present-day tensions around access and site management. As I deliver my increasingly honed tour script, we pass by the spot that I had previously visited with Jill, and where James and I had recently encountered some workers digging ponds. The work has now been completed and it is clear that these new pools have been deliberately placed in an area that was being used as a regular pathway. This is to protect the fragile peat layer and to create diverse habitats, but I suspect it won’t be well received by all the people who walk here.

Sandy talks about the entanglements of people, places and practices in her work. That word – entanglements – has been mentioned a few times on these walks, and it is a concept that I have also explored elsewhere. I have walked enough times now for connections and resonances to emerge between walks and walkers. My walk with Sandy has brought this into focus for me. The project is creating its own networks, layering meanings and experiences together, just like the peat that builds the bog.

We are at the end of our journey now and Sandy gets the train back west, joining a different type of network and making more connections as she travels.

Nov 22, 2025

At the far end of the station car park, marking the entrance to the Moss, an old signpost is hidden by the trees. The metal surface has dulled and the information it displays can only be seen from certain angles. The sign points walkers to the canal and tells them how far away it is. Halfway up the pole, two brackets are attached, but whatever they once secured has long since been removed. These empty fixtures are a trace of something that happened here several years ago.

In 2017, an arts organisation called Art Walk Projects worked with East Dunbartonshire Council and the transport charity Sustrans (now known as Walk Wheel Cycle Trust) to develop artworks for the Lenzie area. Inside Lane brought several artists together to develop interventions that would bring the community into a dialogue about routes, links, transport and places. The project was part of a wider exploration of ways to develop the connection between the town’s roads, carparks and pedestrian areas.

One of the artists was Deirdre Macleod and I am walking with her today. I know Deirdre through her work at the University of Edinburgh, where she is a Lecturer in Art at the Centre for Open Learning. Like Ali, she is also a PhD candidate in geography. When I advised on her research at an early stage, I was impressed by Deirdre’s exploratory drawing and urban fieldwork, through which she works with the unknown and cultivates an openness to unexpected events. Our walk today will be framed by these concerns and will help me to think about what I am discovering, as I continue to walk these 100 circles.

I meet Deirdre at the train station and as we join the Moss, we stop to notice the signpost. Deirdre’s contribution to the Inside Lane project was Common Ground, a collection of 50 colourful paintings on aluminium plaques, which were placed around the town and on the Moss. These were conceived as a playful game of spotting the designs in various places, making connections between them and with their surrounding environment, and attending differently to the town and the Moss. It is interesting that almost a decade later, they still have a kind of agency here. Now I will look out for any that are still present, and I will seek out other evidence of their past presence.

We walk slowly, talking about noticing and attending carefully to the environment as we go. It has been freezing overnight and there is now a sharp chill in the air. We look at strange formations of ice on the pools that cover the woodland floor. A submerged branch is surrounded by spikey needles, reaching out across the surface of the water. We enjoy the crunch of our footsteps as we tread on frozen ground.

As we make our slow, chilly way along the northern path, we pass a smartly dressed woman, fixated on her phone and dragging a wheeled suitcase. She is in a rush and looks like she has been transported from an airport concourse. It is a moment of dissonance with the surroundings and the pace of our own journey, but it shows that the Moss hosts many different types of people, all of whom have their own needs and intentions.

We turn onto the boardwalk and enjoy an encounter with a flock of long-tailed tits, bouncing from tree to tree and filling the air with high-pitched shrills and playful flight. These sounds and movements are made all the more noticeable by the stillness of the wintery atmosphere, which also amplifies the traffic sounds from the nearby roads. There are lots of people walking their dogs today, taking in the sights and sounds of a beautiful cold day.

As we walk, Deirdre reflects on walking, slowing down, and the making of time and space. In her work, she spends a lot of time in the places she is responding to. Through sketches, diagrams, photos and text, Deirdre connects her own rhythms and actions to those of the site. Slowly and tentatively, these lead to gentle interventions in the landscape, which sometimes involve inviting people to come together in a movement or gathering. The work is unassuming and sensitive to existing patterns and connections. We talk about artistic process, and we are both convinced that the considered, patient methods that Deirdre uses have value in and of themselves. When I walked with Ellie, we talked about this as well. Sometimes it is difficult to resist the expectation that artists’ work will lead to specific outcomes. What artists can also do is encourage different ways of relating to the world.

Deirdre has taken some time away from work recently and she took the opportunity to focus on her allotment. She visited regularly and immersed herself in reorganising, creating meandering paths and taking the apparently controversial decision to plant flowers – cornflowers, marigolds and nasturtiums. Deirdre talks about the value of tending to a plot in this way. She says it is sometimes important to take the long way round.

We turn onto the path across the bog. An exposed root system offers a metaphor for the kind of meandering, entangled ways of being that Deirdre is promoting. We examine bracket fungus on the trees and different types of moss. We crouch down and use our phones (a technological accompaniment that I now feel much more relaxed about using so often, thanks to James) to identify haircap and plait mosses. Our conversation about noticing has shifted us into a different way of being here (an effect that I also experienced with David, some months ago). Past walks entangle with this one and I imagine a complex root structure, holding it all together.

We return to the station a few minutes before the next train departs. After I say farewell to Deirdre and thank her for making time and space to return to Lenzie for this walk, I turn and head up the hill towards home. I check every lamppost and fence for signs of the artworks, but I don’t see anything. I will keep looking though. I will keep noticing.

Nov 21, 2025

I am walking with a colleague from the University. James is a Lecturer in Digital Education, and I have learned a lot from him about the relationship between the physical and digital classroom. When I told him about this project, he was interested in visiting a place that might seem to be separated from the technologies, networks and media that are so present in our everyday lives, but that would actually turn out to be entangled with digital experiences in multiple ways. I am looking forward to an encounter with the digital bog.

As we walk, we cannot avoid the elephant in the Moss. Our university is undergoing a period of instability and a close colleague of mine is fighting for her job this week. Our union has called strike action next week and we are all worried about which departments and courses will be closed, and which of us will be made redundant. James and I are active researchers and are kept very busy with full teaching loads, and so we hope that makes us more secure in our jobs, but nobody can be completely relaxed at the moment. We allow ourselves to talk about this for a while, before we turn to the Moss.

Both of us are enjoying a day off work today (although we note that this walk is part of a research project and the fact that we are doing it on a day of leave says something about the way academics tend to blur the boundaries between work and leisure). James has travelled to Lenzie by train, and this is his first visit. A walk round the Moss will be good for both of us – an opportunity to take a break from the marking and the teaching and the stress of industrial action. It has been raining heavily overnight but now the sun shines low through the bare branches, causing the waterlogged woodland to shimmer as the light is dispersed by the trees. This place invites us to slow down, breathe in and be present.

We discuss the assemblages of digital objects that facilitate and determine our encounter with the site. I replaced my phone this week and I am constantly testing the camera; it is much better than my old one and it captures moments of our walk in 48 megapixels (four times the resolution of the old camera). Our phones are always in our pockets, close to hand and ready to search for information. And the organisation of this walk – the email exchanges, the checking of timetables and booking of tickets – took place online. More than that, the way we think about places, the cultural references we bring to our interpretation of the site, the things we think about and care about, are all shaped by digital media. There is a word for this interconnected, intermedial world that we now live in: postdigital. James and I are working on a co-edited book together that will explore the relationship between postdigital thinking, education, and journeys.

As a lecturer in digital education, James does a lot of his teaching online, so his students are always on computers as they learn. In the physical classroom, students usually have laptops open and often use their phones during lectures and discussions. James suggests that attempts to create tech-free learning spaces could actually have the unintended effect of making our phones and computers have an even bigger impact on our learning, as their absence makes them powerful distractions. He says that we often have a ‘matter-of-fact’ approach to digital technologies, as they are now an established part of how we experience and understand the world.

Despite embracing all these digital elements, James nevertheless tells me that he resisted the urge to read up about Lenzie Moss prior to his visit. He knows very little and I therefore offer a bit of context. I tell him about the history of peat extraction at the site: the Royal Charter of 1226 that allowed monks to remove peat; the Kirkintilloch burgesses, or Peat Lords, who increased the scale of the operation; the industrialisation of the site and the commercial peatworks that continued until the 1960s.

James is very interested in the human exploitation (and later, protection) of the Moss. He tells me that he loves places like this, but that they really come to life for him through these details. It is significant that he hears all this directly from me, as we walk around the site, but then I reflect that I first learnt of this history through online research, and have studied the site on Google Maps to see where the peat industry has left its mark. My own understanding of Lenzie Moss is certainly emerging through an entanglement of physical and digital information and experiences. And I am sharing this blog online. Many of the people I have walked with – Steve, Alison, Andy and others – got in touch because they had heard about the project on social media.

As we talk about these digital connections, a woman and her dog walk towards us, following the boardwalk in the other direction. I recognise them. I have, in fact, been looking out for them. I am a member of the Lenziechat Facebook group and have been enjoying the many beautiful photographs of Lenzie and Kirkintilloch that are regularly posted there. I am pleased to meet one of the site’s top contributors! I tell her about my project, and she seems up for joining me for a walk one day. She tells us about her macular degeneration, and we talk about our cameras. Cameras are a way of extending her vision, reaching things that she otherwise couldn’t see. This is an important part of the postdigital conversation. For some, digital tools are enabling – they allow access and facilitate inclusion.

For the final stage of our walk, we head off the main path and make our way across the bog and into the woods. Here, we encounter a couple of workers in bright orange jackets. I ask them what they are doing and they tell me they are digging pools for amphibians. What they don’t say, and what I know to be the case, is that these pools are also strategically placed to discourage access to this part of the Moss. This is the exact spot that I visited with Jill – the route that had been made accessible with a makeshift boardwalk, created from a section of fencing. I get the sense that the contractors are reluctant to be drawn into a conversation about their work, so we move on.

James is intrigued by my earlier mention of the ruined peat processing plant, and we seek it out. We also visit the concrete base near by – the one that Ali and I explored as a potential stage for a performance and Clare’s daughter had referred to as ‘the bottom of a castle’. James is drawn to a brick, half buried in the mud. We can’t quite make out the writing – something like Seamill (a west coast town that I have often visited) but we search online and can’t find any evidence of a brickworks there. Another brick, exposed at the top of the foundations is much clearer: Rosehall. This was a brickworks connected to the colliery in Coatbridge, so it has not travelled far.

During this walk, I have learnt new things, met new people, shared my knowledge, and enjoyed some quality time with a colleague. All of these things took place on the physical site of Lenzie Moss. We scraped mud of the bricks, saw the light shifting in the trees, inhaled the fresh air. But they have also been made possible through digital platforms, devices and networks. The entanglement of the physical and digital has been revealed today, just as we hoped that it would be. This has been a valuable opportunity to take a postdigital learning journey together. If that’s not work, then I don’t know what is. And we are doing it on our day off. Let’s hope that university recognises this commitment to our research and lets us carry on doing it.

Nov 10, 2025

Get out there and have your adventure today. (Stephen Mason, Ride to the Midnight Sun)

On the morning before I meet Steve, it is raining heavily. I feel confident that he won’t be phased by the weather though. Steve is a true adventurer. Last year, he completed all of Scotland’s 282 Munros (mountains over 3,000 feet). He has been all over the world on his trusty BMW motorbike, Borris. And he has written extensively about his travels. Steve’s books are full of warm and engaging anecdotes and they are philosophical, too. They tell a story of embracing life, seeking out new experiences, and making things happen. He tells me that he is ‘a motor biker who writes, rather than a writer who bikes’. But I don’t know what he is like as a biker and all I can say is that I am enjoying his stories.

The rain obligingly eases off as we set off around the Moss. I am interested to know what Steve feels about this place. Compared to the long, dusty roadways of North America, the unfamiliar territories of Russia and Patagonia, and the mountains of Morocco, I wonder if he sees this bog as too small, too local and too predictable? Steve understands what I am getting at and tells me that on the contrary, he very much appreciates life in Lenzie and sees the Moss as a special place that he will always be able to return to. The thought of returning has helped him through some of the most challenging parts of his trips. When Steve was searched by Russian police and detained when they found a packet of codeine tablets that he had inadvertently brought along from Scotland, he was seriously worried that he might not make it back.

Steve moved to Lenzie 25 years ago after spending most of his life in Ayrshire. He also spent some time working in Silicon Valley but has long since retired from his work in computer manufacture. Like me, Steve didn’t know very much about the town before he decided to move here. The Moss was an extra bonus, and he is thankful to live close to a place that is so well maintained and with such a rich history. Steve often walks and cycles on these pathways.

Unlike some other areas of Glasgow’s greenbelt, Steve feels reasonably confident that the Moss will be protected from development. This is a concern of his though: while Steve understands the importance of building new homes and infrastructure, he is worried about the encroachment onto greenspaces. He lives near Whitegates Park, which has been designated as the site for a huge new school development in the area and a lot of the community are devastated by the loss of a vital parkland at the centre of the town. This has made him value proximity to nature even more.

As we walk down the boardwalk, a slow line of roe deer crosses over the bog beside us. Steve is pleased to see them for the first time. I am becoming quite familiar with these animals through these walks, and they seem to favour this area particularly. I attempt to photograph their passage, but they are a bit too far away for a good image. The photos that I manage to take are apparently of the bog with the line of trees and the top of the hill range in the background. But look closely and you can see a few white tails. The Moss is full of gifts and surprises for those who visit often and watch carefully.

Steve tells me about an occasion when he was walking on the Moss with his family and they came across a group placing painted stones along the path. He later added to the collection with his young grandchildren. I mention that I have previously found such stones buried by my house and wonder if they were made by the pupils at the old primary school next door. It turns out that Steve knows my house – his wife’s friend having lived there around 15 years ago. Steve remembers attending a wedding that took place in my garden! I tell him about my walk with Sophie, when I learnt about some other past residents of my house, a couple who lived there many years earlier.

As we look out to the Campsies, I ask Steve about his Munro bagging. For his last climb, he chose Beinn na Lap, by Corrour Station on Rannoch Moor (the highest and most remote main line station in Britain). I climbed the same mountain in 2006 with a friend and remember snowy peaks and thick fog making the route treacherous. For a couple of years, I climbed several Munros and aspired to bag them all one day. Many years have passed since my last one and I have to admit that I have given up on the idea of climbing them all. Steve completed his challenge on a much finer day, and he also walked with his family. On the same day that Steve climbed his final Munro, his 5-year-old grandson managed his first. My own 5-year-old, Ruairidh, enjoys hill walking, but hasn’t yet summitted a whole mountain. Steve inspires me to head up a Munro with Ru one day soon.

Steve talks about the appeal of Munro bagging. He says he is very goal-orientated and he enjoyed keeping a spreadsheet of his climbs, revelling in changing the cells to green each time he completed another peak. I suppose that my Lenzie Moss project is goal-orientated, too. I will reach 100 walks in a couple of years or so, and that will be a good feeling. It is always satisfying to add another post to the blog. Perhaps Bog Blogging could become a new craze.

But I also think that my slow, repetitive circling of the mire offers something counter to the big expeditions that Steve has enjoyed. Lenzie Moss might not be experienced on the same scale as the motorbikes and Munros. But it has deer and stones and views of the hills beyond, and I discover new things each time I share an hour with a new walker. Every time I travel round the Moss, I go on a little adventure.

Nov 1, 2025