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.
