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 a fairy door into the world that was already around us.
Ruby tells me that she has had a tough week in her studies. They 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 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)
