It is the last day of the year, and I am walking with four-year-old Minnie and her mum, Jenni. Jenni and I were in the same tutorial group when we started university in 2000, and we have stayed close friends ever since. We have been in each other’s lives for quarter of a century now, which is both amazing and alarming. We are all spending Hogmanay with James and Annabel and their family in Bishopbriggs, but there is just enough time for a walk round the Moss before the festivities begin.

We would have had more time, but shortly after Minnie and Jenni left their home in Galashiels in the Scottish Borders, their car broke down. Thankfully, after the AA and Jenni’s mum came to the rescue, they made it to Lenzie shortly before sunset. We set off quickly, keen to complete our circle while we can still see the paths. Minnie loves being outside and she is full of energy and excitement, which seems only to have increased after four hours in the car (much of which was spent happily watching films on her mum’s phone).

As we walk up Bea’s Path, Minnie sets the pace. She alternates between slow motion and hyperspeed, as only a preschooler can. I am called to action, ‘Come on, Uncle Dave!’ While 95% of people in my life now call me David, there is a small proportion of my oldest friends, who have resolutely stuck with Dave. These people indoctrinate their children so that I will never be fully free of my diminutive past.

I teach Minnie Ruairidh’s ‘Moss animal game’ and she enjoys picking out the imposters from our sets of bog inhabitants: a fox, a hedgehog and a giraffe; a pigeon, a hippopotamus and a deer. We don’t see the latter today, but there are plenty of pigeons nesting in the bare branches, which Minnie is keen for me to photograph. Minnie stops to crunch the ice with her wellies.

Next week, Minnie will start full time at nursery, where she will spend two full days of each week outside. I tell Jenni how much Iona got out of her time at an outdoor nursery, and I remember my recent chat with Brian about the Residential Outdoor Education Bill. As a primary head teacher, Jenni is well versed in the shifts and turns of Scottish education policy. It has been interesting to discover that there are connections in our work on interdisciplinary learning and teaching.

Minnie wants to race, so I sprint alongside her on the north woods path, maintaining a strategic second place. The race evolves and Jenni joins in too. We hop, jump and skip along. Each time we pass a bench, Minnie demonstrates her gymnastic skills and uses them as balance beams. We pass the bin by Heather Drive, which is overflowing with coffee cups and dog poo bags. The service has paused for the holiday, which highlights how regularly this site needs to be cleared, and how well-looked after it usually is. Minnie asks me why I am photographing a bin.

Minnie picks moor-grass and pokes me with it. I retaliate and we battle with grass swords. In the final moments of daylight, an otherworldly atmosphere descends on the Moss. The moon shines brightly above the mire and shadows move in amongst the trees. Minnie picks up on this and says she is scared, but an encouraging word from her mum soon sets her mind at ease. We watch the lights appear on the urban horizon to the west and we look out across the heather, and I think how ideal the conditions would be for a sighting of the ghostly lights of a will-o’-the-wisp, dancing across the bog.

And then, Minnie falls over. I am leading the way along the muddy path, and I miss the moment it happens. When I turn back, she is being lifted out of a puddle, and her hands and knees are covered in black peat. Minnie is not happy. The next ten minutes are focussed on consoling her. Jenni finally has some success when she tells Minnie that she can wipe her hands on her mum. I also offer up my hat, which is refused at first, but later it helps to lift her spirits again.

We follow the meandering pathway through the trees, and Jenni has to carry her distraught child. I lead the way, directing her round boggy areas and looking for the easiest route back to the main path. Little by little, Minnie cheers up. But she is upset that she will have to change her favourite dress, chosen specifically for the new year’s celebrations. As we emerge from the woodland, Jenni has mud smeared across her face like a camouflaged soldier.

Back at my house, Jenni gets Minnie cleaned up and changed, while I load the car with bottles and boxes. Tonight, we will eat together, play games with the children, watch television, drink champagne, welcome in the new year in good company. Last Hogmanay, Jenni and Minnie joined me and my children in the Lake District, and we jumped into the new year together – a Danish tradition that I learned from my brother-in-law, which requires standing on chairs and leaping off into a prosperous future. Jenni and I have decided we will do this every year. I like the positivity, the energy, and the action of meeting any new experiences that the coming year might bring.

Since I leapt into 2025 with Jenni, the year has brought me many things, and among the most valuable has been the 34 walks that I have completed round Lenzie Moss. I have walked with friends, family, neighbours, ecologists, scientists, artists, writers, and I have met several new people from the local area. I have circled the Moss in summer, autumn and winter; early in the morning and late at night. I have come to know this place well and I have learnt a lot from its pathways and its peat bog, and from the stories of the people who live and work here. I am happy to be bringing this year to an end by sharing this place with my old friend and her wonderful little girl.

From shared beginnings, my younger brother Phil and I have taken quite different paths through life. Phil went to university in Sheffield, as did my sister, so they were always closer to our family home in Derbyshire. Since I moved to Scotland 25 years ago, we have not spent huge amounts of time together, and when we have it has generally been during gatherings with the rest of the family. Phil now works as a finance director for a large outsourcing company in London, where he recently relocated. He has a very busy social life and travels a lot with friends and through work (recent trips include India, South America and Svalbard). There have been very few times when it has just been the two of us, but as Phil is the first to arrive to Lenzie for Christmas this year, we have a few hours together on the morning of Christmas Eve. He is keen to join me for a walk round the Moss before the rest of the family start to appear.

Phil arrived by train from London late last night and we shared some cheese and wine and caught up before bed. He is not yet officially on holiday and today he has ‘a big deal to tie up’ before he can switch off from work. He is receiving emails from the second he wakes up. Our walk will have to be early and relatively quick, and then we will set up an office space for him in his nephew’s bedroom. By tomorrow, there will be several people and dogs here.

We join the Moss at the end of Fern Avenue, and I notice the smell of gas once again. I phoned the National Gas Emergency Service when I walked by yesterday morning and there were engineers in and out of my neighbours’ houses for the rest of the day. I can’t help but feel guilty that one of them is now without a working boiler, meaning that they might be missing heating or an oven over Christmas. But as my brother rightly points out, I would feel a lot worse if I hadn’t called it in and there had been an accident.

We step away from domestic infrastructure, and into the darkness of Bea’s Path. It is strikingly quiet and we talk with hushed voices. But it is also busier than expected and we encounter a parade of walkers, some presumably commuting to the station and others with dogs. We see the blinding torchlight first, moving unpredictably through the blackness and difficult to gauge for speed or distance. Then a mumbled or nodded greeting as they pass. When I took an early morning walk with Cathy, it was midsummer and the sun had risen long before we set off. Greetings were much warmer then, but now it seems that nobody is ready or able to connect.

Along the north woods path, the lights from the houses remind us that we are never far from human inhabitations. Phil has recently moved to Putney, and he is close to a number of large green spaces – Putney Common, Richmond Park and Wimbledon Common. These spaces are important to him and offer a valuable escape from a frenetic urban life. He walks and runs in these parks and says that in places, it feels like you are in the middle of the Peak District. He mentions Richmond’s red and fallow deer, and I tell him about Lenzie’s roes.

My brother knows a lot about deer. His friend is a professional deer stalker, and Phil has often joined him on shoots. Phil even completed a qualification last year, so has a lot of current knowledge of deer management and ecology. His friend has recently taken a new post at Kielder Forest in Northumberland and is busy culling twenty per cent of the herds there. Phil hopes to join him there in the next few weeks.

I have been entirely convinced of the need to manage deer in this way. Deer have huge impacts on the environment, preventing the regeneration of woodland and limiting biodiversity. In the absence of natural predators such as wolves or lynx, their numbers have to be controlled by shooting, which is the only viable way of managing populations at scale. I am very sure that Phil practices deer stalking with the utmost care and responsibility. I am equally sure that it is something I will never choose to do.

Phil talks about the quality of time he now spends in the outdoors through this hobby. He says that looking for something in the landscape means slowing down and attending to the environment in a different way. He talks about sitting and waiting at dawn or dusk, alert to the slightest change and witness to birds and animals’ movements in time and space. These are the things that matter to him. I think of what Jill told me about peat cutting on Lewis: that people who extract peat there know how to do it sustainably and maintain a deep respect for the land. These ostensibly violent practices of rural life – cutting, shooting, culling – can foster a much greater sense of care and responsibility than is usually found in urban and peri-urban green spaces.

Phil has not come prepared for a muddy walk round the Moss (he has travelled light as his next stop is Marrakesh). He opts for the south wood path rather than trekking across the bog. As the sky lightens, we watch the trains speeding past on their way to Edinburgh, notably emptier than usual but still transporting those busy professionals who need to tie up their various deals on Christmas Eve. Phil also needs to get back to the laptop. I will prepare for my parents and children arriving while he works, and we will all be sitting round the kitchen table before the day returns to darkness.

While we have circled the Moss more quickly than I am accustomed to on these walks, it hasn’t felt rushed. We have still been able to slow down, attune to the environment, and take notice of the changing light. It strikes me that what I am doing through this project is deepening my connection with this place, getting to know it better, learning to read the landscape and know its patterns and cycles. Phil and I might do things differently sometimes, and our journeys might take us in different directions, and play out at different speeds and scales, but as I complete my early morning walk with my brother on Christmas Eve, I am reminded, and reassured, that we share the same values.

In the same week that I started this project, my friend James stayed up all night delivering a litter of puppies. He hadn’t planned to be doing this, but he had reluctantly agreed to look after his mum’s dog during her pregnancy, to raise the newly born pups, and to sell them on when they were old enough. In a household with two young children, it was pretty much accepted that they would keep one. They chose the only girl and called her Bonnie.

I hadn’t planned to have a pet, either. But when I visited with my children, several humans and dogs looked up at me with wide eyes and I folded. ‘Okay’, I said. ‘We’ll take that one and he can be called Clyde’. I have only seen my daughter reach that level of happiness once before, when her little brother was born. Bonnie now lives with James and his family, and Clyde with me and mine, but they spend a great deal of time together and I am very grateful for my friend’s help. James and his wife Annabel have always been there to support me; Annabel used to look after Ruairidh one day a week, when he was still a baby.

Clyde has been unwell and has taken to his bed this morning. I walked too far with him the other day and he has since been lethargic and full of cold. I think he’s okay, but another lazy day will do him good. So, James and Bonnie will join me for a circle of the Moss while Clyde stays at home. But he wouldn’t have been allowed to join us anyway. He has already been on one of these walks with my mum, and allowing him a second go would be against the rules!

James has just dropped the kids at school and driven over here from Bishopbriggs. He brings Bonnie into the kitchen while I get ready, and suddenly Clyde is full of energy again. The two puppies are a handful. They are often quite rough with each other and while we are sure that it is all good natured, there seems to be a lot of biting and growling involved in their play. The size difference is getting much greater now. Clyde looks twice the size of his little sister, who nevertheless gives as good as she gets. We leave Clyde behind and I feel guilty as he barks disapprovingly.

Last time I walked round the Moss with James, both our families joined us. As we shepherded our various children and animals round a muddy bog, I remember thinking how times have changed. I met James and Annabel in my first year of university, after I moved to Glasgow at the age of eighteen. For years, we spent much of our time at house parties, pubs and clubs. James and I made theatre shows together and have been on countless trips around Europe. While we still manage the occasional holiday with our friendship group, we mostly see each other with the children these days.

We have both left the city now, although James moved to Bishopbriggs several years before I finally let go of my urban lifestyle. James says that they left Glasgow and moved to Scotland, by which he means that their current home feels more rooted in the community, and connected to the landscape around the town. Bonnie and Clyde have now shifted our lifestyles even further away from regular drinking in the city’s bars, towards walks in the countryside and meals at each other’s homes. It means a lot that after all these years of births, deaths, marriages and divorces, we are all still so close.

As we follow the pathways round the Moss, we meet a lot of other dog walkers. Bonnie is excited to explore an unfamiliar place and to meet new friends. She bounds up over-enthusiastically to all the other dogs and James has to hold her back. James is also enjoying these encounters, and he chats away to everyone we meet. James is a pub quiz master and Humanist celebrant, so he is in the business of meeting people and asking them lots of questions. It takes us a long time to reach the boardwalk.

We sit on a bench and look out over the Moss. I spot the deer playing in the centre of the bog. Last week, James conducted a wedding ceremony on the Isle of Skye. He shows me the photos and says that the landscape here is very similar. I see what he means: the grasses and the heather are recognisable, although the stunning mountainous backdrop is quite different to our current view of the unassuming Campsies. I remember camping on Skye with James twenty years ago. I wonder how many miles we have walked together since then.

We follow the path through the birchwood, and James lets Bonnie off the lead. She bounces between the trees, running back and forth across the path. An elderly toy poodle, who I also met on my walk with Iona, is bothered by Bonnie’s boisterous play, so James puts her back on the lead for the last section of the walk. We complete our circuit and return to my kitchen, where we share a cup of coffee and a slice of chocolate log.

We chat about our plans for the weekend. On Saturday, James, Annabel and I will meet four other friends for our annual ‘urban family Christmas’. They have a babysitter arranged, and my parents have kindly offered to stay at my house for the weekend to child and dog sit while we are off having fun. We will meet for lunch in Glasgow and then we’ll see where the day takes us. Times like that are rare and precious, and I always look forward to them immensely. But they are the exception now to a different way of being together. Today, I am embracing these walks around Lenzie Moss with old and new friends, sharing food in our kitchens, and making plans for the children and the puppies. This is a new phase in my life, and I am thankful that James is still such a big part of it.

The day is slow to start and when it finally does, it stays overcast and grey. Thankfully the rain is holding off when I meet Linsey. We walk up the high street, and I point out the boarded-up windows on a couple of the shop fronts. When I bought a wreath for my front door in Moss Flowers a few days ago, I discovered that the glass had been smashed during the night. There was a lot of vandalism that weekend. Graffiti tags have appeared on signs and walls. Christmas brings out the best and worst in people.

Linsey and I are both off work today and we are meeting for a walk between present buying and wrapping. My house is going to be busy next week, so I am getting as much done as I can before my children and extended family and all their dogs start to arrive. Linsey has lots to get ready too, but she has stopped by Lenzie on her way to visit a relative. A walk round the Moss will be a welcome break for both of us.

Linsey started to visit Lenzie Moss during the lockdown years of 2020 and 2021. With two young children to entertain, and the usual indoor play centres closed, she began to venture out into local parks and woodland. From their home in the neighbouring town of Bishopbriggs, they searched for nearby places to spend time outdoors. Lenzie Moss was a perfect size for a morning’s visit. They would poke sticks into the bog to see how deep they went, take detours along woodland trails to see what they could find, and seek out ruined buildings and public artworks. Their visits always took longer than expected.

In the years that followed, Linsey kept coming back here. Once, after a friend had been through a difficult time, they walked round the Moss together and talked things over. For Linsey, there is something about the circular route that makes a walk here particularly satisfying. You know where you are going and you leave the site at the same place as you enter it. The layout of paths around the perimeter of the bog lends itself to an hour in company, as I can attest.

As we turn onto the northern path through the wood, I notice a canvas structure through the trees. It looks like a tent or some sort of shelter. The woodland is very wet today, and it is not easy to get any closer, so we move on without investigating further. I hope that nobody is sleeping in there at such a cold and wet time of year. Hopefully it is a hideout for adventurous local kids – those who don’t vandalise public property for fun.

Linsey tells me about a den that her family built in the woods four years ago. It still stands, although it has deteriorated with the years. They visited lots of other places during lockdown, many of which they continue to return to. The den was in the Wilderness Plantation – the site of a Roman fortlet on the Antonine Wall. And they have also enjoyed visits to Cairnhill woods in Bearsden and the fairy woods in Milton-of-Campsie. Often, Linsey finds out about new places through community groups and social networks. Some of these sites, like the Moss, have intriguing industrial pasts. Wilderness Plantation is close to Mavis Valley, a former mining village with a tragic history, which was abandoned in the 1940s. Linsey tells me that the remnants of the old buildings can still be found amongst the trees.

Linsey values the proximity of people. She likes places where back gardens border green spaces and is drawn to games and activities arranged by local parents and teachers. I have seen this side of the Moss. I remember Steve telling me about stone painting, and recall the various artworks and performances I have encountered here. These qualities made the Moss a popular site during lockdown and a lot of people discovered it then, or began using it in a different way (as with Cathy’s 6am walks).

We pass a large group of dogs and their walkers at the top of the boardwalk. I tell Linsey about my own dog, and I mention that he spends a lot of time in Bishopbriggs. It turns out that Linsey knows my friends, James and Annabel, who live with Clyde’s sister, Bonnie. James looks after Clyde whenever I am at work in Edinburgh. Linsey’s daughter is in the same class as my friends’ eldest (my Humanist ‘guide son’). She has often seen them with the two puppies on the school run. Connections like this often happen on these walks, as I recently noted when I walked with Michael. In another such coincidence, I will be walking here with James and Bonnie tomorrow.

During our walk we have noted the location of the stacks – the public artworks that Linsey always looks out for when she comes here. We reach the third and final one as we pass the old peatworks. This, too, has been graffitied: a tag with a V and and N forming an X in the centre. I wonder what it means and who put it there. Close to the stack sculptures are signposts with QR codes, which link to the Trails and Tales website. Linsey has discovered a few artworks and new places to explore through this online resource, which documents a large-scale heritage and arts project that ran for a few years from 2014 across the East Dunbartonshire area.

As we wander along the path by the railway line, we pass a spruce tree that somebody has decorated with baubles and tinsel. Against the barren birches and the leaf litter, it is a welcome moment of festive cheer. In the busy run up to Christmas, someone has taken time to make this gesture of community spirit. There is a strange sort of balance enacted by this tree. It somehow makes the broken windows less impactful.

In different ways, people will continue to mark this landscape. While the graffiti, public artworks, signage, and festive installations are all created for different reasons, by people with different relationships to the Moss, they are all part of this complex, multi-faceted site. I understand why Linsey is drawn to green spaces that are characterised by human inhabitations. Lenzie Moss is no wilderness: it is lived in, used, and loved. As I am discovering through this project, these human interventions create this place, as much as they take place within it.

Today is the first day of this year’s wonderfully long Christmas holiday, so I should be relaxed and jovial. But I have just had to take my car back to the garage after some very expensive repairs have failed to do the job. So I am feeling stressed as I return to Lenzie by train, just in time to meet Michael outside Billington’s. A friendly introduction soon settles my mood, and we set off to join the Moss through the station carpark. We are accompanied by Lucy, Michael’s old red labrador, who very calmly wanders along beside us. I will talk and walk myself into better spirits.

Michael is in his fifties and has very recently moved back to Lenzie with his family, after many decades living elsewhere. He first moved to the town at the age of seven and lived here until he left to study. His memories of growing up here are not entirely positive, but he talks about returning home and doing so on his own terms. For Michael, the view of the Campsies across the bog represents a lifelong connection to this place. It is the image that comes to mind when he thinks of home.

Michael tells me that a lot has changed here while he has been away. There is more to do now, with a lively high-street and improved transport links. As I also learnt from Alison, the Moss has been developed a great deal too, with new pathways and conservation of the woodland and the bog, and careful management of the relationship between the two. Michael has changed, too. He moved here after living in different cities – London, Edinburgh and Brussels – and then settling in the nearby new town of Cumbernauld. As he enjoyed a career change from public relations to academia, he reached a slower, quieter phase of life that would be nurtured by living next to the Moss. Michael also tells me that Lucy has never been happier than on her walks here.

As a teenager in the eighties, the Moss was there for Michael in a different way. He would come here on his own as an escape from the cloying insularism of small-town Scotland, with all its sectarianism and conservatism. The Moss was also a good place for a sneaky cigarette. As a catholic, Michael went to school at St. Ninian’s in Kirkintilloch, beyond the predominantly protestant area of Lenzie. Michael and his school friends typically played together in Peel Park, so Lenzie Moss was often his private domain. At other times, Michael would visit the Moss with friends. He says that there must be evidence of this: countless lost shoes, claimed by the bog.

Michael’s memories of growing up here lead me to reminisce about my own childhood in rural Derbyshire, and we soon discover a connection. The nearest town to my village was Matlock, where I went to secondary school. It turns out that Michael’s wife is from Matlock as well. Michael moved to Lenzie in the early eighties, in the year that I was born. I suppose that his wife would also have been growing up in Derbyshire back then. Walking this route with so many people has revealed several unexpected connections like this: Steve attending a wedding in my garden; Sophie and Cathy knowing each other from university. It is always pleasing to be reminded of how entangled we all are.

We find another connection around my work in theatre, and I learn that Michael is from a family of actors, including the well-known couple, Barbara Rafferty and Sean Scanlan, both of whom appeared in the popular Scottish sitcom, Rab C. Nesbitt. Michael’s fifteen-year-old also acts and has had roles in award-winning films. After my walk with Nalini, I have been thinking of developing a performance project about Lenzie, so it is useful to know that there are more actors living here. I think I have now met enough to form a small theatre company!

We reach the bottom of the boardwalk and Michael opts for the less muddy path along the railway, which is also Lucy’s preference. I suggest a detour, and we wander along the edge of the bog a short way to look out towards the Campsies. The sun shines through the clouds, casting shifting light onto the hills. Michael enjoys how remote this place can feel, even though Glasgow is only a few short miles southwest. He likens it to Rannoch Moor, a large area of wetlands to the south of Lochaber, which I traversed years ago when I walked the West Highland Way. Once again, I find myself imagining a longer walk that starts here and takes me over the hills and far to the north. Maybe I could chart a route that connects all the peatbogs from home to the Hebrides (from where Jill has just emailed me).

We double back on ourselves, and Michael says that this is something he always tries to avoid on the Moss. If he veers off the main path and ends up somewhere new, he always looks for an alternative route. I like this rule and I share my own for this project: always anticlockwise; only one person at a time; no predetermined questions or topics. I am discovering that everyone who regularly walks round the Moss falls into their own patterns and habits. Walking with Michael shows me that some of these can endure over time, lying dormant for decades but easily reestablished when we return to the places of our childhood.

It seems that Michael is very happy to be back in Lenzie. Looking back to his earlier life here, he even wonders whether it was really the town that was the problem. Maybe some sixteen-year-olds would have a tough time wherever they were. At any rate, it suits him here now and he is where he wants to be.

As we reach the station car park (I almost forgot about my car for a while!), we chat for a bit longer about work, before we go our separate ways. We agree to stay in touch. It is good to be slowly getting to know more people in the community through these walks. While I am much newer to Lenzie than many of the people I have walked with, each time I complete a circle of the Moss, I feel that I know this place a little better.

I am becoming a bit of a peat geek and have started attending the Peat Café – a series of online lunchtime seminars featuring interdisciplinary perspectives on wetlands. The latest of these included a presentation by Phil, who is now based at the University of Stirling. He presented on his postgraduate research into pollen analysis at Glen Devon in Perthshire, where there is a large-scale peatland restoration project underway. As I have been hoping to walk with someone who takes a more empirical approach to investigating sites like Lenzie Moss, I am pleased when he accepts an invitation to walk with me.

I meet Phil from the train and even though I recently watched his talk, I don’t immediately recognise him. He spots me straight away though and we quickly set off. I fire question after question at Phil. He is an archaeologist and a paleoecologist. He has recently completed a Master’s degree at the University of Glasgow and is embarking on a PhD at Stirling as part of the Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory. He is currently selecting his sites and hopes to spend more time in the field that he has so far been able to. He uses core sampling to build a picture of the layers of history that comprise a peat bog. Phil tells me that he is interested in telling stories of change.

During Phil’s talk, he had shared the results of his analysis of pollen, which offers a precisely datable record of the species of flora present in the landscape at any given time. This helps to inform our understanding of shifting agricultural practices and other uses of the land. Phil talks me through the process, which is surprisingly analogue and manual. It starts with a ‘Russian corer’ – a rudimentary metal device that captures peat within a metal cylinder that turns around an axis to hold the sample in place as it is removed. This means that the peat is left undisturbed and can easily be divided into subsamples for analysis back at the lab. Phil then separates the pollen from other organic matter by sifting, floating and using chemical purification. When he has what he is after, he uses a microscope to identify species.

While Phil has been looking for pollen, there are other ‘proxies’ that can be used to build a picture of changing environments. These include charcoal and also diatoms, which I haven’t heard of before. Phil explains that these are single-celled microscopic algae that exist in almost all watery environments. He now realises that I know very little, but continues to patiently respond to my questions. He tells me that all these indicators are useful for different things, but analysing pollen can reveal a great deal about changing vegetation, which helps us to understand how peatland environments have been used and inhabited.

As we reach the noticeboard at the far end of the northern pathway, we come across Paul, the chair of Friends of Lenzie Moss, who is busy replacing posters. I am pleased to be able to report that I have been on more than twenty walks since he joined me back in July. The more I complete these circles of the Moss, the more likely it becomes that I will bump into people I know. Phil is also interested in the social and cultural stories of the places that he researches, which enhance and expand scientific insight. I ask him about the human side of his practice, and he tells me that negotiating permissions from landowners is an important part of his research.

I ask Phil how he would select a place to take a sample. Looking out across the Moss, he notices the lines of heather crossing the bog. The heather indicates that it might be too dry to get a good sample. Conversely, it can’t be too wet. After a lot of rain, the bog is looking particularly saturated today. In some places, the peat layer can float above bodies of water.

We walk along the path across the bog and follow the old railway embankment a short way so that we are standing in the centre of the Moss. Phil tells me that the deepest (and oldest) core he knows of in Scotland went 9 meters deep and reached back to the end of the last ice age. His have been much shallower but the anoxic bog preserves centuries of slowly accumulating history, which are often close to the surface after peat cutting has taken place.

Phil picks up some sphagnum moss and talks about its properties. He holds a vibrant green clump in his hand and squeezes it to show me how much water it holds (apparently three times its size). Phil says that sphagnum is a ‘bog builder’ and notes its lack of roots.

As we walk through the woodland to return to the train station, Phil talks about the way that the natural world is often forgotten and left out of heritage research. This is partly because a lot has been lost and I see that Phil’s work is about searching for what has been left behind. He tells me about the ways in which moss has been used as a material by humans. In Aberdeen’s Maritime Museum, there is a section of moss rope on display. It was found in an early medieval pit and may have been used for binding thatch on to roofs and for mooring boats. I wonder what traces of human presence at Lenzie Moss might still be discoverable using Phil’s methods.

We return to the station just as a train arrives at the other side of the track. Phil makes the call to try to get that one home, so we say a very quick goodbye. I watch him cross the bridge and step onto the train just in time. This has been a brief but fascinating lesson in a more technical, scientific approach to knowing a place like this. It has been quite different to the slow, meandering wanders that I have shared with artists this year, but this walk has revealed new depths and layers to my understanding of the Moss.

I am walking with my eleven-year-old daughter, Iona. We have been waiting for a good time to do this for a while and today it is just the two of us at home, so it is the perfect opportunity. It is a foggy Saturday morning at the start of December and some of the houses on our street – ours included – have their Christmas lights on already. It feels like one of those mornings in the holidays when everyone puts on their wellies and treks out into the countryside. It is good to be outside together.

Iona instinctively gets the idea behind this project and she walks slowly, taking everything in. She says that I go too fast and makes me match her pace. We examine trees heavy with lichen, deep red hawthorn berries, mosses and heather. Iona says that she wants to roll around in the grass, but it has been raining so she settles for jumping up and down at the top of a raised bank. She says that she likes being surrounded by so much nature and that she appreciates being able to spend time outside the city, where she stays for the half of the week that she is not with me. Iona feels that she has the best of both worlds, living between Lenzie and Glasgow.

Iona recently went on a residential trip with her class to Blairvadach Outdoor Education Centre on the shores of the Gare Loch to the west of Glasgow. They saw seals, had a day canoeing on Loch Ard, went gorge walking, and climbed Lime Craig, where they looked out to the Carse of Stirling and the Highland Boundary Fault. Iona returned full of stories and a renewed love of the outdoors. On their way up the hill, the instructors told them about ‘old man’s beard’, a shrubby lichen so called because it was packed into the neckline of farm workers and shepherds’ jackets, to keep them warm in the winter months. Iona thinks that the lichen we have found today might be what they were talking about.

At the far end of the north path, we reach one of the stacks (Toby Paterson, Dug Macleod and Simon Whatley’s peat stack sculptures that punctuate the route). Iona can’t resist climbing up and standing on top of it. Then we move on to the climbing tree, which neither of my children seem able to pass without ascending. Today, without her little brother Ruairidh following her into perilous situations, Iona climbs higher and higher. She shouts down from the top branches, saying that I look very small. When I eventually persuade her to come down, she descends too quickly and slips on a wet branch. I catch my breath and she is unharmed, but a passing couple express their concern. Iona jumps onto my shoulders from one of the lower branches and she clings on tightly, but I eventually manage to struggle free of her strong grip and lower her to the ground.

As we follow the boardwalk, we pass countless dog walkers and joggers – one wearing a fetching Santa hat. We step onto one of the resting areas to the side of the walkway and look out over the fields towards Bishopbriggs. I tell Iona that there is a continuous urban area from there to her other home in the southside. Only a thin strip of greenbelt separates us from the city. In the other direction, we can only just make out the vague shapes of the Campsies – a dark line visible through the fog. It would be possible to walk through the clouds, over the hills, and northwards to the Highlands, without passing through a built-up area. We are at the edge of something – standing on a threshold. I say that this is a liminal place, and Iona says she doesn’t know what that means and that I should stop being so philosophical.

We can hear geese flying overhead, but the cloud is too thick for us to see them. A woman and her tiny poodle stop to chat. I have met them before on my walks with Clyde. She says that the geese go to the Gadloch to the south of the railway line and she talks about seeing the pink-footed geese at the Montrose basin – another Local Nature Reserve. I will remember this and will plan to visit one day.

We wander along the pathway that borders the bog and I show Iona the new pond, where the fencing I saw on my walk with Chris has now been removed. Given the ongoing tensions around this area, I am not comfortable to cross it to reach the tree swing, which Iona is keen to visit. We go back on ourselves, following the boardwalk to the bottom. We reach the second stack, which Iona pauses to stand on, then we take the muddy path into the woods.

After a quick swing, we follow the meandering pathway through the birchwood. I show Iona the bracket fungi, and we see more lichen growing in big clumps on the branches. Looking up at the canopy, Iona spots clusters of sticks resembling untidy birds’ nests. These are ‘witches brooms’, abnormal growths that are sometimes caused by fungal infections. My parents used to tell me and my siblings that these were naughty boys and girls, who had been transformed into these twiggy bundles by witches. Iona is alarmed by this, and I agree with her that this was a rather cruel thing to tell us!

We emerge by the ruined peat stacking shed on the main path by the railway line. At the other side is the third and final stack, and Iona leaps onto it before stepping over onto the foundations of the building. She has jumped, climbed, balanced and bounced around the Moss this morning and I am reminded that she is still a little girl, despite her maturity and self-confidence. I hope that she will stay in this place for a while yet – a liminal zone between childhood and adolescence, where I get the best of both worlds.

The speed and scale of change is now a matter of scientific fact that in turn generates matters of shared concern for how to imagine and organise a common future. (Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, Thinking with the Harrisons)

Chris finds me in my garden, where I have just moved a beech sapling that had taken root too close to my house, and re-planted it in the hollowed stump of a great ash that had to be felled when I first moved here. I will be delighted if this works and I tell Chris to check back in a few years. Since I first met Chris around fifteen years ago, there have been long periods when we have not been in touch, but our paths sometimes cross in the overlapping space between art and academia, and it is always a pleasure to reconnect. When he heard about this project, Chris got in touch to tell me he had recently moved up to Glasgow from Ayr, and as he was now nearby, he offered to walk with me.

After walking with so many artists recently (Kyriaki, Deirdre, Ellie), this is a great opportunity to talk with someone who researches, teaches and produces EcoArt – an art of connections and relationships with place and environment, which often suggests new ways of being in and engaging with the world around us. Chris convenes ecoartscotland – an online resource on art and ecology – and is a Lecturer in Art at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen (part of Robert Gordon University). We met in Ayr during my first academic job at the University of the West of Scotland, when we were involved in a partnership project with South Ayrshire Council and some of the main arts organisations in the region. At the time, Chris wrote favourably about a performance I directed at the Robert Burns Birthplace museum in Alloway. We have been following each other’s work since then, and I am currently enjoying his recently published book about ‘thinking with’ the environmental artists known as the Harrisons.

It is raining heavily as we start our walk and I photograph the concentric circles created in the woodland pools – an appropriate image for the 100 circles that I am making here. That this place seems to invite artistic representation and interpretation perhaps partly explains why my project has attracted so many artists to walk with me. I have certainly found it harder to connect with scientists and others who take a more empirical approach to understanding ecosystems.

Chris offers a different take on this: he suggests that the way that science is funded, taught and carried out in the modern university is conditioned by ‘technocratic’ structures that demand measurable outputs and quantifiable impact. This means that it can be difficult for some to justify spending time outside their typical work processes to go on adventures without clearly defined endpoints. I feel this tension, too. Both Chris and I are in the midst of marking and moderation and endless meetings in the final weeks of the year. To carve out over an hour for a walk around a peatbog with little sense of what this might reveal or lead to, is a leap of faith. Chris suggests that artists might be more able to meet opportunities like this with a willing spirit and open mind. I think there may be some truth in this, but I am also sure that I will find some hard scientists who have a similar curiosity and disregard of institutional expectations.

The Harrisons paid careful attention to the complexities of the environments that they worked within. Their art, which often involved large scale plans and interventions in landscapes and across entire regions, was developed through deep immersion in places and the careful building of relationships with the people who lived and worked there. Chris’s book tells us that the Harrisons ‘position themselves as generalists in conversation with whoever can support their learning of the issues of a place’. I am also seeking a ‘growing ecological awareness’ of this place that I have chosen to live beside. And it is this practice of walking and talking that is making this happen. My conversations with artists over the last few weeks and months have helped me to realise that this slow meandering process is itself the work, and that measurable outputs and impact are not the point of doing this.

We reach the place that I previously visited with Ruairidh, Jill and James and see the latest move in an ongoing war of attrition. The land between the path and the trees, where my children often play on the swing, was originally becoming damaged with an exposed peat layer that became very muddy after wet weather. When I walked with Jill, we found that a section of fencing had been placed over the ground as a makeshift boardwalk. During my more recent walk with James, we saw a pond being created in the middle of this area, which I surmised at the time was to prevent access as much as it was to diversify habitats. Today, I notice that the fencing has been replaced in a curve around the pond. I am fairly sure that it is the original section, but it looks like another part of the exclosure by the boardwalk has also been removed. I wonder what the next move will be in this battle, which only seems to subject the bog to futile one-upmanship. My growing awareness of the ecology of this place is also a deeper understanding of the human politics and social dynamics of the site.

We stand and look out over the bog as the rain gives way to a gentle glow. Chris wonders how we can get people to value a place like this and invest in its future. We talk about community ownership and how much easier it is to bring people into a relationship with woodland sites. The Moss is complex and may be harder to understand and appreciate.

Lenzie Moss is subject to the scale and speed of change that defines the current ecological crisis. Scientists can measure this and evidence it, and when I eventually manage to persuade some to walk with me, I hope I will learn something about how sites like this are impacted by wider environmental forces. But the Harrisons understood that a scientific knowledge of a place like this only becomes meaningful when the state of things brings us together, and leads us to imagine what the future might be. Chris has helped me understand how powerful art can be in that project. And if that doesn’t justify an hour trudging round a bog in the rain, then I don’t know what does.

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.

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.