I have walked many, many miles with my children over the years, and both of them will make excellent companions on this journey. My son, Ruairidh (usually Ru), joins me for the next of these walks. He is five years old and not yet at school. I am excited to find out what strange and unpredictable things he will tell me about the Moss, and where his curiosity will take us. Unlike his city-loving older sister, Ru is in his element on outdoor expeditions and one of his favourite activities is when we head off on our ‘Ru walks’. On these trips – often taken between dinner and bedtime – Ru gets to choose which way we go (more or less). Often, we have ended up in unfamiliar housing estates or overgrown pathways through unexplored woodland. I plant gentle suggestions rather than setting our direction. The trick is to make him think it is his idea. ‘Where shall we go on our next Ru walk?’ ‘Did you know there’s a tree swing on the Moss?’

We set off between rain showers on a warm Saturday evening. I tell Ru about a deer I encountered in our garden the previous morning. This was only the second time this had happened; the first was during the winter storms. Wandering bleary eyed into the garden to dispose of coffee grounds in the undergrowth, I became aware of something large in the bushes at the far side of the lawn. I stepped towards the noise and suddenly a flighty doe bolted over the wall onto the street and off down towards the Moss. I watched her as she wondered about entering a couple of my neighbours’ gardens, but she seemed to know how to get home and eventually made her way back along the pathway to the woods. Ru is thrilled to hear of this event, and we are now on a mission to find the herd.

As we walk, multiple distractions interrupt our progress. We collect leaves, imagine crocodiles in the now waterlogged woodland, throw stones into the pools, and peer between the trees for signs of the deer. We also have a repertoire of games for the Moss and we go through them as we follow the main path. A favourite is ‘the Moss animal game’, when we take it in turns to say three animals (or sometimes trees) and then guess which are the true inhabitants of the Moss. ‘A holly tree, an oak tree, and a lemon tree’, then getting sillier, ‘a fire vole, an earth vole and a water vole?’ We are revelling in each other’s company.

Ru is keen to follow some of the desire lines that lead off into the Moss, or through the waters of the carr on the other side of the main pathway. I have to explain to him that the land is fragile and that we can’t walk too much where there isn’t a proper path. I also explain the dangers involved, particularly on a day like this when the land is so sodden and marshy. Ru listens carefully and understands what I am saying, but he has not forgotten about the tree swing and assure him that a detour will be permissible when we reach the other side of the Moss.

Another thing that we do every time we visit this place together is to open the Merlin app on my phone and identify the various bird calls. There are many now: great tit, robin, goldfinch, pigeon, starling, magpie, willow warbler, jackdaw, wren – all of these we have heard before. Then, as we pass an ancient oak tree halfway along the northern border, a picture of a long-eared owl appears! We look up into the canopy and I wonder if the technology is correct on this one. At this moment, a couple walk by and one of them asks what we have seen. She is very excited by my answer and tells me that she has seen owls here before. She also has Merlin on her phone and shows Ru what her phone has detected. They plan to return at dusk to listen again, and as they continue on their way, Ru and I hang back until he hurries me along to find the swing.

We turn onto the boardwalk and the open grassland to the west is covered in bog cotton, the fluffy white heads dancing in the light breeze. Ru is intrigued by their ability to grow out of the muddy water, and he lies down with his head over the edge of the path to get as close as he can. This prompts another regular routine, when I hold him upside down and pretend to drop him over the edge: ‘throw me in the bog, Dad!’. As we playfully make our way towards the southern woodland, we pass several walkers, some with dogs, and they all smile to see a happy little boy and his dad enjoying nature. We watch meadow pipits and use the app once more to identify their high piping call.

Ru not only has a talent for rhyme, he also knows how to use it to get what he wants. As we approach the end of the boardwalk, he launches into a funny little song:

I’m really, really tired.
My hands and knees are weak.
Daddy, will you carry me?
Otherwise, I’ll shriek!

I am unable to resist a request delivered so inventively, so I lift him up and we walk for a while with him clinging onto me. But we are now close to the spot where the tree swing was pointed out to me, so we step over tree routes and climb down a muddy bank. The swing is a stick hanging by a rope from an overhanging branch. Ru holds onto it, and I push him for a while. He is delighted.

Ru is keen to continue along the woodland trail at the edge of the bog, but I have to insist on returning to the main path. Trains pass by and we hear shouting at the other side of the track – a football game, perhaps. As we reach the ruined peat processing station, we explore the area around it and discover a disused metal train track buried in the mud. Ru asks me if it is ‘dead’ and I say that it is, in a way. But he is keen to get home now, and he once again leads the walk, calling for me to catch up, setting the pace. I reflect on how independent my little boy is becoming and wonder about our future journeys and all the detours and distractions that we will enjoy along the way.

May 31, 2025

The heatwave was followed by days of heavy rain, bringing much needed relief to the parched ground and averting the very real risk of fire. I had heard of historic accounts of arson and accidental fires on the Moss and sometimes seen evidence that this was an ongoing problem – charred branches surrounded by empty bottles and discarded rubbish. Last month, an extreme wildfire warning was issued and a grassland fire burned for days in the hills above the nearby town of Cumbernauld, with properties evacuated. A blaze could easily take hold on a dried-out peatland and would quickly damage this fragile ecosystem, polluting the air and endangering all manner of lives. So, in that sense, at least, the rain was welcome.

I thought of those fires when Nalini sent me a voice note a few days before our walk. On an evening cycle round the Moss, she had been stopped in her tracks by an inaccessible barrier of birch branches that had been dragged across the boardwalk. She only reached the halfway point before being forced to return. Nalini called the Moss a place of beauty but while she laughed about it, she was clearly frustrated by this unexpected disruption. By telling me about what had happened, I think she was saying something about the possibility that my project would bring me into contact with some of the tensions and competing uses of the site. ‘I hope you like a challenge’, she said. I do.

Taking advantage of a break in the rain and the extra hour gifted by after school club, we set off together on a Tuesday afternoon. As we reached the main path, Nalini turned to the left and I to the right. These were our habitual routes and for Nalini, the anticlockwise direction was reserved for the school run, while clockwise was for leisure. This was, of course, why we passed each other in opposite directions on my first walk. I shared that there is something important to me about following the same path in the same direction for each of these walks and I hadn’t considered that this might not be the way that my co-walkers would choose to go. As well received as it was, I felt uncomfortable imposing my own preference here, but we nevertheless continued in my chosen direction. I will have to be careful about who is leading who on these walks, even when we appear to be travelling side by side.

The Moss seemed to be breathing out again after a tense few weeks. We fell into a rhythm and took the opportunity to further explore the connections that we had through our work in Scottish theatre. Nalini is an actress and had worked with many of the performers, writers and directors that I had known. I even saw her on stage in her first performance, almost twenty years ago now, but we had never met before I moved to Lenzie. Our conversation took us away from the Moss but as we passed by notable features, we allowed the site to interrupt our flow.

As we walked along the north path through the birchwood, I pointed out the broken and felled branches that I had noticed on my previous visit. I had since confirmed that this intervention had been instructed by East Dunbartonshire Council to allow the bog to recover, by discouraging walkers from leaving the main path and thereby damaging the peatland through repeated footfall. At the same time, the thirsty birch can overwhelm the bog, and the trees have to be frequently cut back to prevent encroachment. The branch barrier was an act of protest, then. As I imparted these fragments of knowledge, which I had held on to for the last week or so, I realised how counterintuitive it seems to protect the site by damaging its established woodland.

I found myself trying to explain these site management policies to Nalini, but I was still underinformed and unsure of the points I was trying to convey. Nalini confessed her lack of knowledge of the ecological importance of the peatland and expressed her surprise that trees would be damaged for this purpose. During her recent misadventure with her bike, she had spoken to a passing walker who had also mentioned this (‘it’s the council’), but she had dismissed it at the time as a local conspiracy theory. I wondered whether this person was, in fact, the perpetrator? Already, I could see that the rationale and aspirations informing the management of the Moss were misaligned with the community’s perception and understanding of these interventions. I wondered if there could be a new initiative to encourage peatland literacy, and whether scientific knowledge of the site should be shared more widely across the town. I would soon take up this discussion with my contact at the council, who had offered to walk with me this summer.

We continued past ‘the climbing tree’ as we approached the start of the boardwalk. Nalini’s geography of the site was marked by her children’s games and exploration. There was also ‘the den’ and ‘the tree swing’, both visible from the main path. Walking with children might reveal an alternative Moss and I planned to complete a circle with one of my own children next, letting them lead me through the detours and delays that typically characterise their progress. Nalini showed me the place where the makeshift blockade had been cleared to the side of the boardwalk.

Nalini moved to Lenzie with her family a couple of years before the COVID-19 lockdown. Her sister already lived in the town and the alure of a slower life away from the city brought them here too. Caught up in the upheaval of the move and a busy work schedule, it was nine months before Nalini visited the Moss. Today, she walks it very regularly, sometimes more than once a day. She is part of a ‘mums’ group’, who often walk it together. As we followed the boardwalk, stepping over broken sections and noting replaced planks, Nalini recalled the lockdown days in 2020 and 2021, when the old path was narrower and it was often necessary to step onto the boggy ground to maintain social distancing as the site bacame more and more popular as an ideal place for the allocated daily exercise.

For the final section of the walk, our attention drifted away from the Moss again and we talked of our time as students and the meandering pathways that we had taken through our careers; of the competing demands of work and childcare, and our children’s various clubs and activities. I was grateful for the chance to get to know another member of my community better and wondered who else I would have the opportunity to take this journey with. As we walked back towards our neighbouring homes, we exchanged greetings with another of our neighbours, setting off on her regular dog walk around the Moss. The circle repeats.

May 27, 2025

I decide to take the first walk on my own.

I enter Lenzie Moss at Fern Avenue on an astonishingly sunny Friday afternoon. The air is thick with seeds, floating like a benign version of the toxic spores in Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Small white butterflies flit about the hawthorn, which is in resplendent bloom like I have never seen before. Robbins, blackbirds and willow warblers sing out in celebration of this abundance. It catches me by surprise, and I take it all in for a moment, enjoying the sun on my skin and the rarity of an encounter with so much concentrated life. I instinctively reach for my phone to take my first photograph, hoping to capture the motion of the springtime air. Looking back at the image, there is little sense of this snow globe effect, but later I see the seeds gathered in the birch branches, snagged like sheep wool on a wire fence.

Someone walks towards me, and I snap out of it, feeling a little embarrassed to be caught inhaling and grinning so unusually. I nod a greeting then realise it is my next-door neighbour, Nalini. Without stopping to chat, we continue along the path in opposite directions. I regret missing the opportunity to tell someone what I am doing but take this as a sign that I should ask her to join me for the next walk. Although I moved to Lenzie with my children two years ago, I have not managed to connect to the local community as much as I had hoped. This is for various reasons, all of which could be surmounted if I was more proactive. I am sure that the idea for this project was partly a response to that sense of disconnection. Issuing an invitation for 100 people (well, 99 if this one is discounted) to walk this route with me over the next few years will allow me to meet many whom I would not otherwise have had a chance to know. And for the small number of people I have already met, I will surely find out something more about them, and what this place means to them.

Today, the bog is severely depleted. Previously saturated areas off the main pathway have dried out over the last few weeks of hot weather and it would be possible – but inadvisable – to step down onto areas I had never previously been able to enter. The ground is crisp and cracked, the waterways reduced to grooves in the brittle mud. Recently, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency warned that Scotland is on track for a summer drought as a lack of rain has brought groundwater levels low. Here, the change in the landscape is a palpable reminder of the fragility of the peat bog, an ecosystem that is facing severe threats in the Anthropocene. I consider how the decline of this place not only poses significant environmental risks – impacting carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and flood management – but also threatens the cultural value of the Moss, which is an archive of past human activities, and a vital part of the town’s sense of itself. I pass by dogwalkers, school children, drunks and joggers, and wonder what each of them could tell me about this storied land.

The parched earth is not the only sign of precarity. Along the birchwood pathway to the north of the site, I pass countless snapped branches and fallen trees. At first, I assume that this is due to the extensive damage caused by Storm Éowyn a few months ago. I am sure that this is the case for some of them, as my garden can attest. However, the breaks seem too methodical, too regular to be caused by a natural phenomenon. I recall mention of conservation work by the rangers who manage this site and suspect that the branches have been felled to create natural barriers to prevent access to the recovering bog and encourage its regeneration. This theory is supported by the rough wattle fences bordering the previously open marshland, and the signs that I saw a few weeks ago discouraging walkers from leaving the main pathway.

I turn left onto the boardwalk that affords passage over the western edge of the Moss, which is the only section without a woodland perimeter. Open blue skies, crossed by vapour trails and stretching out to the Campsie hills to the north. Crows congregate among the heather and gulls fly high overhead. The sound of a passing train cuts through the quiet, travelling between Glasgow and Stirling or Edinburgh. Peering through the gaps in the trees, I watch it pass. I suppose that most of the passengers are commuters on their way home a little early at the end of a busy week. Do they know that this place exists? Do they have any sense of it as the grey of the city gives way to the blurred green of the woodland bordering the railway line? The Moss keeps its secrets.

When the rail route was built, it cut unsympathetically through the peatland, separating the Gadloch – the standing freshwater to the south of the town – from the woodland and the raised bog now known as Lenzie Moss. The railway now eclipses the industrial history of this place, but there are countless traces of older journeys and inhabitations. On the other side of the path, a ruined building is set back in the undergrowth, but largely visible to those who notice. The outline of the building is intact with knee-high stone walls demarking a central space, along with two smaller rooms. It doesn’t look big enough for a dwelling, so given its proximity to the railway, it must have had some industrial function. Maybe they stored tools or machinery for peat extraction. At any rate, it has since been left to crumble. The tops of the walls are covered in grass and plants have lodged in the cracks between the stones. I step over a barrier of green and up onto the structure. Balancing cautiously, I walk along the walls. It seems as though history has a scent here: a damp, earthy residue left by hard-working men loading carts and stacking fuel.

As I approach the end of the circle and make to turn off the pathway, I am surprised to hear my name called out. It is my upstairs neighbour, Shirley, with her bike and two cycling children in tow. At the end of a long day spent outside at school and nursery, the little ones are tired and irritable, and the enthusiastic greeting that I am accustomed to is not forthcoming. I join them for the last leg nevertheless and with one child up ahead and the other trailing behind, we talk of the cloying heat, the benefits of outdoor learning, and the beauty of this place. I correct my earlier mistake by telling Shirley all about this project, inviting her to join me for one of my walks, and we talk about ways to reach out into the community.

It seems fitting that I started this walk on my own and ended it in company. I hope that this is a model for the whole project, and I resolve to mark the 100th walk (whensoever that might be) by inviting all the people who have ever accompanied me to come together in a group journey; a celebration of the many lives and stories that circle the Moss.

May 17, 2025