I leave my house and walk down Kirkintilloch Road to meet Kat at the station. It is early morning, and I join the procession of commuters marching wearily along the pavement. Kat is travelling today too, but she has kindly made time to join me on the Moss before catching her train to Edinburgh, where she runs Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS), Scotland’s longest established environmental charity. I met Kat a couple of years ago when I joined a residential for SHARE (Science, Humanities and Arts Research Exchange) at Auchinreoch, where Kat and her husband Ruedi have created a woodland retreat in the hills to the north of Kirkintilloch. Kat and Ruedi are ecologists and Kat has worked for Scottish Natural Heritage (now NatureScot) and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. She recollects doing some work with Friends of Lenzie Moss two decades ago. I am hoping to learn about peatlands and understand more about the importance of this place.
It turns out there is another reason why Kat is an ideal person to walk with. She tells me that she has also written a blog, for which she spent a year exploring Glasgow’s green belt. Over 27 excursions at weekends and on her days off, Kat covered 300 kilometres, skirting the city’s edges and offering a first-hand account of diverse and fragile environments, many of which have been impacted by heavy industry. In one entry, on discovering a bog by a birchwood between the towns of Cumbernauld and Airdrie, Kat calls herself and her walking companion ‘bog-trotting, tussock-hopping peri-urban adventurers’. I very much hope I will come to be described in such terms.
We have lots to talk about and we join the Moss with our conversation in full flow. Initially, we catch up on work and discuss our various projects, with the site itself as a backdrop. Then, in the north birchwood we step off the path and look out across the heather. Kat talks about raised bogland, stressing that this is one of the last remaining fragments of an ecosystem that was once found all over the Scottish Lowlands. She explains how raised bogs are formed by dead plants such as sphagnum moss, which can hold a tremendous amount of water. These layer up on top of each other, filling hollows carved out by ice age glaciers, and eventually the peat rises above the level of the surrounding land. This means that unlike fens, which are fed by mineral rich groundwater, bogs like Lenzie Moss rely on rainwater, which is low on nutrients. In these conditions, the slow decomposition of organic matter makes the bog acidic. Many of the species that I have encountered on these walks – the carnivorous sundews, the spiky bog heather, the rare bog rosemary, various mosses and grasses – are unique to these places. Raised bogs are of vital ecological importance and hold vast amounts of carbon. And yet, peat extraction persists at many sites, often due to irrevocable licenses than counter the government’s commitment to reach net zero by 2045. Kat describes this as ‘a total environmental disaster’.
Kat tells me about some of the bogs that she has encountered on her walks. These include Cardowan Moss, where there is ‘almost nothing left’; and Drumshangie Moss near Greengairs, which has been hit by waves of peat extraction, coal mining, waste incineration and landfill. Kat has spoken with members of local communities, who have experienced these impacts as a series of relentless ecological injustices. We examine the ariel view of some of the bogs on Google maps, and I immediately recognise the striated patterns that evidence a history of commercial peat cutting. During Kat’s wanders around the edgelands of the city, she saw many of these places. She says that the intact raised bogs pose a particular challenge as ‘they are very, very special and unusual, and next to huge quantities of people’. While this dynamic makes some of these greenbelt environments precarious, Kat’s blog also captures unexpected moments of enchantment:
The dry woodland, where the track was marked, made way for bog, and the sturdy 20 foot high birches made way for trees twisted and dwarfed by a lifetime with their roots in peaty sphagnum. We came across a flush full of flowering Bog Asphodel – a field of yellow stars – this gorgeous bog could have been anywhere in the wilds of the Highlands, Finland, or even Canada. But, instead, we were between Airdrie and Cumbernauld with the roar of the dual carriageway only 100m to the East.
I often feel this way about Lenzie Moss: it is so close to the city with the main trainline only meters away, but sometimes it feels that you could be thousands of miles away in some unchartered wilderness.
We sit on David Lee’s bench and take in the view. A kestrel hovers over the boardwalk. I have been troubled by biting midges for much of this walk and they are particularly bothersome now. Kat seems oblivious so I do my best to ignore them. She tells me about her work at APRS, which has become increasingly challenging as the right-wing media have become more adept at shutting down environmental initiatives. Two significant examples of this are the creation of a new National Park in Galloway and a bottle deposit return scheme, both of which have stalled after years of hard work. Kat feels that environmental campaigning will now need to change in an age of reactionary forces and media campaigns waged in bad faith. The charity continues to work on greenbelt protections and community empowerment in environmental projects. Kat has a lot to do and it is time for her to get to work.
As we return to a busy station car park, I have the feeling we could have walked several laps of the Moss this morning and would still have had more to discuss. Kat offers to walk again with me some time and although I still have 88 circles to complete, I will look forward to our next meeting. Kat sets off on her way east and I walk back home feeling energised and inspired. We need people like Kat, I think: people who will walk hundreds of miles to raise awareness about green spaces; people who will take on governments and champion communities; people who will keep going despite adversity, because they care.
