A couple of months ago, as I was busy reprimanding Clyde for something or other, I was greeted by a couple at the end of my street on their way onto the Moss. They introduced themselves as Tony and Julia and they recognised Clyde from my blog, so surmised that I must be David. Apart from my delight at this moment of very local fame, I was pleased to meet more of my neighbours. Of course, I opportunistically asked if they would be interested in joining me on a walk, and they agreed.

*

We meet on a cloudy Friday morning outside Julia and Tony’s home. I will walk with Julia later in the year, but today is Tony’s turn. Tony is a widely published haiku poet, who often takes his inspiration from very regular ‘orbits’ of Lenzie Moss. He soon corrects my commonly held misconception that haiku always use the five-seven-five syllable format. Tony will read some of his poems as we walk, and I will learn that there is leniency in the length (most poets now average 10-12 syllables). But there are still rules. Haiku are brief impressions of the world, grounded in direct observation, they use cuts or shifts in perception, rather than continuous sentences, and they avoid similes and metaphors. But to use a metaphor, haiku are pebbles cast into the reader’s mind.

I think about the rules that have emerged for my walks, such as traveling in the same direction and only walking with one person at a time. I am breaking one of these today, for a particular reason, and learning that rules are not always appropriate. Julia will accompany us on this walk. This is because Tony has been sight-impaired since birth and is now certified legally blind. He tells me that like about 90% of blind people, he has some sight, but that ‘life is a veritable blur!’ Julia will look out for any obstacles. She says she will let Tony do most of the talking, but I am also hoping to benefit from her keen interest in the birdlife here, which has become very active in recent weeks. And I will look forward to talking more with Julia on another occasion.

As we turn onto the Moss, I check it’s okay to walk anticlockwise and, because of Tony’s reliance on regular patterns and features of the landscape, he says that we really have to. Tony tells me that his blindness is not only limiting: it heightens his perception and focusses his attention to other ways of knowing and being in the world. He feels the earth with his feet, attends closely to the sounds of the birds, and leans into the wind. Perhaps the haiku is the best way to capture and share this experience, creating intense encounters that reward careful attention. We turn off Bea’s Path and pause by the pools that I saw were dried out on my first walk, but which are now full of water. Tony reads the first haiku of the morning (they are typically read twice):

midsummer
neither a tadpole
nor a frog

Caught in an in-between state, like we are at the end of January as the first tentative shoots start to appear, and the birds test their voices. Tony writes many, many haiku – a few every day. These are often in response to a specific location, so they will structure our walk round the Moss today.

We walk along the north woods path and listen for the birds. Julia lists those that they have encountered here, and many of them I have yet to see: swallows, swifts, cuckoos, treecreepers, linnets, skylarks… The latter I had been told were no longer here, but Julia says she saw them last summer. Tony has written about almost all of the birds that Julia mentions.

On the boardwalk, Tony reads another poem:

barely light
   breaking ice
   on the boardwalk

This resonates with my walks here. I remember the ‘barely light’ 6am visit with Cathy and ‘breaking ice’ with Minnie. Tony likes this part of the Moss for its openness and exposure to the elements, and for the cottongrass:

the wind
in every fibre
cottongrass

The white seedheads of the bog cotton, which I noticed in May with Ruairidh, won’t be back for a few months now. There has been a new addition to the bog today, though. A couple of conspicuous sections of fencing have appeared in the centre of the Moss, standing out against the subtle colours of the mire. I wonder whether these are to protect bog rosemary, which is rare and precious here, and could quite easily be snapped up by the resident roes. All three of us feel ambivalent about this intervention and I am sure that there will be others who are strongly opposed. I suspect that they won’t be intact for long.

Having lived in Lenzie for almost three decades and learnt about the history of peat cutting on the Moss, Tony is conscious of the damage that has been done here:

peatland
after fifty years
the scars still show

These scars are there in the striation of the landscape, the fragility of the ground, and the shallowness of the peat. When I walked with Kat, the satellite images that we looked at showed these marks very clearly. Julia and Tony are very supportive of the need to protect a place like this, but they also feel that the right balance has to be found and suggest that it is easy to over-manage the land.

We walk back along the pathway that runs alongside the railway line. Moss grows up the birch trees:

moss…
the quietest
of revolutions

I tell Tony and Julia that I am the chair of the board of trustees for James O’s Humanist charity, which happens to be called A Quiet Revolution. One of their key charitable activities is tree planting, so they are creating more habitats for the birds and the moss:

treecreeper
helter-skelter
        up the mossy trunk

We pass the tree that I noticed with Linsey, which was decorated for Christmas. The tinsel has been dislodged, and nobody has returned to tidy up. But the other visible icon of the festive season still grows strong:

holly leaves
as if this winter
never happened

In haiku, I am told, flora, fauna and seasonal references ‘do the heavy lifting’. But haiku are only complete in the moment of listening or reading. They are the opening of a conversation, an act of co-creation. I have written about performance in similar terms and through this project, have come to think about walking in the same way, too.

We return to our street and spend some time chatting, then Tony and Julia return home and I head back to my desk for the rest of the day. I find it hard to switch back into office mode. Little sparks of verse fire around my head. The Moss has been rendered in a new light for me today. From the shapes and the brightness, something very clear has emerged.

Jan 30, 2026

Since Clyde joined my family, I have been out on the Moss most days and have become a part of the disparate community of dog walkers that repeatedly follows its paths. My neighbour-across-the-street, Ann, and her 14-year-old dog, Sophie, are among my most regular encounters. I met Ann in my pre-dog-owning days, shortly after I moved here in 2023. But we hadn’t chatted properly and our exchanges were brief. Now that I take a walk early most mornings, in all sorts of weather, Ann and I have spoken for longer and more often. When I told Ann about this project, she kindly offered to join me for a walk.

The dogs are staying at home today and we set off on a cold and overcast afternoon to the sound of a robin singing its heart out. Ann has lived in Lenzie for over 50 years and says she is the longest resident of our street. She started exploring the Moss when it was overgrown and mostly inaccessible for her children’s prams, and now she is out here with her dog (and occasionally also her son’s, who now lives on the next street) very often – usually twice a day and regularly timed to avoid the school traffic. Ann doesn’t tend to walk all the way round now as it is too far for Sophie. I actually saw them earlier today when I walked with Clyde. Poor Sophie was limping a little, with what the vet later confirmed as an abscess on her paw. Ann also has a 20-year-old cat at home, who no longer ventures outside.

My seven months of dog walking have introduced me to a new kind of connection to this place and to the people who frequent it. I have realised that some – like Ann – are delighted to see energetic puppies bouncing up to them to say hello. Often, dogs run around the paths off their lead and excitedly chase each other when they meet. Ann says that lots of people, and also their dogs, know her well now. In conditions like this, she wears a weather and muddy paw resistant coat, which has dog treats secreted in its deep pockets. Dog walking brings warm smiles of recognition and enthusiastic greetings. Conversely, others are bothered by the unwanted attention and sometimes there are nervous, old or aggressive dogs that have to be avoided. You develop a sense for it.

We pass the grassland by Heather drive and Ann says she is concerned about the pools here, which could be dangerous for children and small dogs. As I saw when I walked with James L, there have been additional ponds dug in key locations around the site. Ann is not convinced about these and wonders what they are meant for. She has been walking here for decades and remembers a time when the mire was left to its own devices. She questions the necessity of the more recent flurry of fences, barriers, banks and ditches. Since the site was designated as a Local Nature Reserve and access was increased with new paths and the board walk, the added footfall perhaps makes more management inevitable. But through these walks, I now understand some of the reasons why the conservation work has not always been well received.

Ann has a lot of memories of this place. She tells me about an occasion when her son and his primary school friend went off to play on the Moss. When the agreed 5pm dinner time passed, Ann set off to find them and came across their abandoned bikes. She says she was never worried and soon found them hanging out up a tree, oblivious to the time. Ann recalls other times when she has had close encounters with the bog. She remembers a walk to the far side of the Moss many years ago, during which her husband momentarily lost a welly; and another when she stepped onto a grassy bank and found that it was far less stable than it appeared.

I tell Ann about one of my very first visits to the Moss, when I made a similar mistake. I remember it vividly. Thinking I would be able to hop between clods of earth, I brought my foot down to test the stability of a tuft of grass. My boot passed through the surface like a stone into water, and I immediately missed my footing. Losing my balance, my right leg swung instinctively forward to brace for the impact and it, too, sunk into the mud without resistance. I managed to quickly turn my full body and lifted my right leg up and out of the ground again. I ended up on all fours, covered in mud with my heart racing. Ann and I remember the feeling of embarrassment and the hard-earned lesson that this place can be treacherous for those who underestimate it.

We pass the old benches in the south woods path – one broken and the other removed. Ann says that the missing bench used to have a plaque in memory of a regular Moss visitor, David Lee. When I walked with Paul, I learnt that the newer benches were paid for with a bequest left by David. Ann remembers him and says that he used to enthusiastically predict the next train to pass, sharing his knowledge about the engine and the carriages. On cue, a train passes by on its way to Glasgow. Ann tells me that her father was a railway policeman and inspector, and that her childhood in Fife was enhanced by free first-class travel around the country and beyond.

As we arrive back on our street, Ann tells me about my house. Like Steve, she also remembers the wedding that took place in our garden. She also mentions an old stable block at the back of the property. The large pile of bricks in the corner of my garden is all that is left of this now. Ann also backs Clare’s theory that the corridor of land beyond was originally where the railway line transported cut peat from the bog to the town. My upstairs neighbour told me that they have seen the deer using this land as a passageway behind the gardens.

My walk with Ann has taught me about the ways in which the Moss has changed over the last decades. It is a marvellous thing: to have a long connection to a place and to have lived in the same area for so long. As a new member of this community, I am grateful to have learned more about what was here before me. Today’s walk and conversation have made me feel more connected to these memories and histories, and I am now creating my own. Perhaps I will still be living here in 50 years, still walking around the Moss.

Jan 23, 2026

The first place you ever knew was warm and wild and wet
And in that dark womb you grew
We are all bog born.
(Karine Polwart, ‘We are all bog born’)

It has rained heavily overnight but this morning the sun is shining brightly through the clouds and the whole place sparkles. It feels like a good day for my second chance to walk with Ruby. She should have been the 19th walker to circle the Moss with me, but as I confessed to Ellie, who took that place instead, I missed my appointment earlier that morning. This cost Ruby a wasted trip all the way from her home near the Pentlands, just south of Edinburgh. Graciously, Ruby has returned today, and I couldn’t be more thankful. I meet her by her car at the far end of the station carpark. As we set off, I notice that a fairy door has appeared in a birch tree.

This isn’t quite Ruby’s first visit to Lenzie Moss, then. When she made the trip to meet me back in October, having realised that I wasn’t going to show up, she ventured some way onto the Moss. This will be her first full circle though. One major difference from three months ago is the birdsong that we encounter. Today, there are robins, great and blue tits, jackdaws, dunnocks and goldfinches soundtracking our walk. It feels like a spring morning, although we are still in the middle of winter.

Ruby recently returned to higher education after a decade working for NGOs, first in human rights and aid, and more recently in climate. She continues to work as a fundraiser for Friends of the Earth Scotland, but is now in the final stage of her MSc in Environment, Culture and Society at the University of Edinburgh. Ruby tells me of a recent fieldtrip with her class to Fala Moor in Midlothian, where they met the Scottish folk artist Karine Polwart. They explored soundscapes and field recordings and responded creatively to the bog.

I have seen Karine Polwart perform as part of the Spell Songs ensemble, a musical response to Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s book, The Lost Words, which conjures up ‘acrostic spell-poems’ by Macfarlane, illustrated by Morris. These poems are a way of rescuing words about the natural world, which are slowly disappearing from our children’s vocabularies. I have a print of Morris’ goldfinches on my bedroom wall and their gilded flight is the first thing I see each day. The spell songs are like stepping through an enchanted portal into the world that was already around us.

Ruby tells me that she has had a tough week in her studies. Her coursemates are at the stage of pitching and refining their dissertation projects and Ruby has experienced something of an awakening to the scale and scope of research that is achievable. She is having to redesign her project and let go of some of the aspirations and ideas that had made it feel exciting. Ruby understands that this is part of the process and recognises that her master’s dissertation is the start of something that she can continue to develop in other places and contexts. But nevertheless, it is a difficult moment. Ruby values the opportunity to explore Lenzie Moss today and says ‘it will help me get out of my head’. A flock of pink-footed geese arches overhead.

Ruby has always had a strong connection to landscapes and environments. She grew up in Ecuador, moving to Speyside in Scotland at the age of ten. Her father was a geologist in the Ecuadorian mining industry. Ruby learned to snorkel when she was two and has always felt drawn to watery worlds. She says that all her formative memories are bound up in the places she has lived. At the same time, Ruby is concerned with extractive relationships with places. There is a clear connection between her childhood experiences and the work she is now doing.

All these concerns have informed Ruby’s research plans. She has been inspired by the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program, the ‘interdisciplinary initiative advancing rights and well-being for humans, nonhumans, and the web of life that sustains us all’. The MOTH Program is informed by Ecuador’s pioneering rights of nature legal framework – especially the landmark 2021 Constitutional Court ruling that established legal rights for the Los Cedros cloud forest. They have also contributed to collaborative projects with Ecuadorian Indigenous communities, such as the Sarayaku people of the Amazon, whose activism has been central to these new laws. One of the key members of the collective is Robert Macfarlane, whose latest book, Is a River Alive? asks whether a rivers are living entities, which should be recognised as such, legally and imaginatively.

Ruby’s connections with this collective have led her to seek out other examples of rights of nature projects, such as the Embassy of the North Sea, an initiative based in the Netherlands that aims to listen to and act on behalf of the sea. Their mission statement is ‘to emancipate the North Sea in all its diversity as a fully fledged political player, via collectives of humans and non-humans’. Ruby has been inspired by the activism and creativity of organisations such as this. She now wants to explore the possibility of such a project in Scottish waters. Could the seabed have legal rights? Could human and more-than-human communities work together to protect the environment? How could we build sustainable futures for all? These are big questions and I now understand how Ruby’s plans for a masters dissertation may have been too ambitious.

As we walk, Ruby collects litter. I notice her almost unconsciously picking up a coffee cup lid and a crisp packet. When I ask her about this, she says that she does it all the time. She recently purchased a grabber stick, which she uses to tidy the woodland area behind her flat. Ruby says that removing litter is a way of caring for the land, which for her is vital. I tell her about Kyriaki’s artistic practice and recall retrieving a discarded drinks can from the Moss, which she planned to use in an artwork. I wonder what became of that found aluminium – whether it was melted down and recast.

As we complete our circle, we spend some time balancing on the foundations of the old peat plant. Ruby says this is what she would have done as a child. She notes the mature birch trees that are growing from the centre of the building. They have the right to do that, I think. And thanks to the work of Macfarlane and others, we now have the language to assert that right. I recall some other words that Karine Polwart sang:

Enter the wild with care, my love, and speak the things you see
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow.
(Spell Songs ensemble, ‘Lost Words Blessing’)

Jan 17, 2026

For the first walk of 2026, I am joined by Eddie, an engagement officer at Archaeology Scotland. Eddie is preparing to lead some fieldtrips at Lenzie Moss with pupils at the local secondary school, Lenzie Academy. He has studied maps of the area, searched the archives, and planned locations for augering (a method of core sampling, similar to the coring method that Phil G told me about). But this is Eddie’s first visit to the site. It is a valuable opportunity for him to plan the visits for later in the year, when the weather will hopefully be more agreeable than this cold, wet day.

Eddie is working on a large-scale project known as the Clyde Valley Archaeological Research Framework (CVARF). Eddie’s job is to work with the local authorities in the Clyde River catchment to ensure public engagement with the project. Lenzie is part of East Dunbartonshire, but there will also be workshops and fieldtrips exploring the archaeology of the Clyde in East Renfrewshire, Glasgow City, Inverclyde, North Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, South Lanarkshire and West Dunbartonshire. Together, over a third of Scotland’s population live in these areas.

As we walk from the station up Bea’s Path, Eddie tells me what he has discovered so far. He mentions the Roy Military Survey of Scotland, an extensive survey of Scotland’s landscape between 1747-1755. A hundred years or so before the modern Lenzie was built, it is possible to see that the bog reached further and connected with other wetland areas. The trainline was constructed in the 1830s and 40s, cutting through the landscape and soon bringing further building (including my house on the new Fern Avenue some time around 1870, when Jane Vary Campbell and David Sinclair Campbell may have been the first occupants). Lenzie Moss became demarcated, boxed in, and separated.

Eddie will share this mapping exercise with S3 pupils – fourteen- and fifteen-year-old’s in their third year of Scottish secondary education. Prior to their fieldtrip to the Moss, they will also learn about some of the things that have been found in local bogs. These include the Cambusnethan bog body, found in North Lanarkshire in 1932, and initially believed to be a 17th-century Presbyterian Covenanter; and the Peelhill horde, the discovery of Late Bronze Age weapons at a site in South Lanarkshire in 1961, which were most likely buried ritualistically after a battle. While the bog body may in fact have been a murder victim, who died some years later than originally thought, both cases raise questions about the ways that bogs have been used throughout history as spaces of transition, between life and death, our world and the next.

I tell Eddie what I know about a gruesome discovery on Lenzie Moss, recounted in Bill Black’s excellent history of ‘Peat Extraction on Lenzie Moss’:

[Colin Graham] was on the moss about 400 yards west of Moncrieff Avenue on Wednesday [7th] July 1880. He had dug down about 4 feet when, suddenly, he exposed a human head, partially preserved, including the hair. When it was extracted it was identified as that of a female but further exploration around the area by the police failed to produce the remainder of the body. The victim was never identified, although it was suggested it might be that of a domestic servant, employed some years earlier by Mr Lang at Gallowhill House. She had disappeared without explanation, a fact confirmed by Lang, but in circumstances that were described as ‘suspicious.’

I imagine myself in the position of a teenager learning all this and then being invited to explore the local peatland. Perhaps they will hope to make a discovery of their own, whether grisly or golden.

When Eddie and the school groups extract samples from this site, they will look at the different layers and see how the differences in the peat indicate how long the bog has been forming, whether accumulation has slowed due to drainage and extraction, and how the site has been used for fuel, grazing, or industrial use. They will consider the different proxies that can be measured, such as Phil’s pollen analysis and Meike’s data on elemental composition. Eddie has a real passion for ‘weird watery places’ like this, and I can see how this enthusiasm makes him the ideal person to inspire young people about our local peatlands. Eddie reminds me that Lenzie Moss is a tiny fragment of what was once a wide-reaching area of lowland bogs.

We head onto the bog path and walk a short way into the centre of the Moss. Eddie tells me about the survey he is currently undertaking of Rannoch Moor in the Scottish Highlands. He spends days poring over satellite images of the site, identifying evidence of different activities and infrastructure, such as grazing, sheilings, and charcoal burning platforms. Eddie wants to counter the idea that places like this are ‘wicked wild wastes’, by developing archaeological narratives about moors and bogs. Rannoch Moor has been mentioned a few times on these walks. Like Michael, I think of Lenzie Moss as a miniature landscape that recalls the vast expanse of Rannoch. Despite the difference in scale, both places have complex histories of use and inhabitation.

We reach the southeast woodland and make our way through the trees to the ruins. I’m sure that Eddie will have some thoughts about the old buildings. I have always assumed that the concrete platform that I have explored with Meike and others, was part of the light railway that was used for the peat extraction industry. Eddie agrees that this is likely and says it would be easy to confirm that by checking the plans for the site. While he is careful to frame his response as purely speculative, Eddie offers an alternative theory. He tells me that during the Second World War, a number of fake townships were created by positioning lights in rural areas away from major urban centres, in an effort to trick the Luftwaffe into wasting their bombs. Whenever large concrete platforms are located in places like this, that is always a possibility. Alternatively, as the Moss was an important location for fuel and close to the railway line, this could be the base of a barrage balloon, the gas-filled deterrents of low-flying aircraft, which could be brought down by the steel cabling tethering them to their concrete bases. While these theories might not be accurate in this case, I will now be on the search for such structures on future walks.

We exit the Moss into the station carpark and pass the Nature Reserve notice board, with the Friends of Lenzie Moss map of the site. After walking through history with Eddie, I am reminded that the current layout is only a snapshot in time. Bogs are often thought of archives of past events, whose traces are preserved for generations. Pollen, metals, artefacts and the dead are buried deep in the ground and are later discovered by farmers, peat cutters and archaeologists. But bogs have futures too. If we can teach young people about them now, then there will be people to care about them, visit them and stay close to them as they change along with the next generation.

Jan 16, 2026