| Article 2663 of soc.culture.celtic:
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From: [email protected] (Frank Maloney)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british,soc.culture.celtic
Subject: Peat Bog story in Wall Street Journal
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 Jan 91 22:40:00 GMT
Reply-To: [email protected] (Frank Maloney)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 66
Xref: sousa.enet.dec.com soc.culture.british:7715 soc.culture.celtic:2663
In the center column, page 1, of the Wall Street Journal for
Mon., Jan. 7, is an article entitled "European Peatniks Are
Trying to Save Historic Irish Bogs", with the following
subhead: "Dank and Quivering Mires Now Evolve as Sanctuaries
Of Rare Plants, Dead Men."
The story by Glynn Mapes is datelined Birr, Ireland.
According to the story, scientists and conservationists have
called for a boycott of horticultural peat as a way of
preserving the bogs as sanctuaries. These so-called peatniks
say, according to Mapes, that the Irish and British bogs
will be destroyed in 10 to 20 years.
A specialist at the Nature Convervancy is quoted as saying
that bogs are an ancient landscape, 8,000 years old,
preserving perfectly the flora of the Neolithic Age.
The article also speaks of Neolithic humans being preserved
in the bacteria-free peat, including the Lindow man found in
a bog near Manchester. The lower half of his body was
destroyed by a peat-cutting machine, but the remainder is
dark and leathery, with a beard and a neatly cut throat.
The House of Lords has debated bog preservation.
Mapes describes walking in a bog and what he/she saw. This
particular bog is called All-Saints and was purchased by the
Irish government for preservation, although one corner is
outside the conversation area and is being cut to provide
potting material for gardeners in England. The reporter says
experts predict this will drain water away from the rest of
the bog and destroy it.
Peat producers in Ireland and the U.K. have mounted a
campaign to save the $140 million horticultural-peat market in
Britain. They say there's plenty of bogs left, 6.7 million
acres in the British Isles. They say they're working less
than 1% of that. They are mounting a p.r. campaign in garden
centers about their responsible attitudes and their
dedication to environmental protection.
The peatniks dispute the acreage and the percentage figure.
Geoff Hamilton, a British gardening columnist and BBC
gardening figure, is quoted as saying only 4% of the bogs
are left.
An alternative to peat in providing water retention and soil
aeration has been found, apparently, in coir, made from
coconut husks.
Impetus to the save-the-bog campaign cames from the Dutch,
especially Matthijs Schouten, a botanist who started a
foundation to buy Irish bogs because the Dutch bogs were
gone and this was the next best thing.
The article says the Irish were shocked that foreigners
cared so much about something they had viewed as a symbol of
waste and poverty.
It's a good article and obviously I've left out a lot in my
summary.
--
Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
"The dim boy claps because the others clap."
Richard Hugo, "The Freaks at Spurgin Road Field"
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| All Aboard the Bog Water Express - Cormac MacConnell
(Irish Voice 3/16/1991)
I hope that you will someday come to Blackwater Bog, whose heart is in
Offaly but whose soul lies in Galway, and there catch the new Bog
Train, now running every hour, on the narrow gauge journey through our
yesterdays. I hope that ye will not forget to catch the Bog Train.
It is a reality of modern Ireland that fewer and fewer people go to the
bogs, like in the old days, even though, paradoxically, more turf is
being used than ever before. It is in the nature, I suppose, of
development. More turf, from the brown heart of Ireland, from the Bog
of Allen, is now being developed daily than ever before because it is
needed, in milled form, for the giant power stations set up long ago by
the State to capitalize on a natural resource.
More houses are burning a kind of turf too because Bord na Mona (the
Peat Board), one of the success stories of the State's growth, produces
handy bales of compressed briquettes which are as common a sight in the
centers of cities as they are outside country grocery shops. This
marketing effort, incidentally, has been greatly assisted in recent
seasons by a series of gravel-voiced adverts on radio and T.V.
featuring no less than Dubliner Ronnie Drew and his long-time crony
Banjo Barney McKennan. Many's the turf fire that pair of boyos have
watched dying to embers in their lively lives!
However, because of this centralized production, and the development,
in many regions, of co-operative groups developed specifically for
machine turf production, the dotted little figures of families on the
brown faces of the bogs of Ireland have frequently been replaced by the
larger and larger machines, crawling over the heatherscape, spitting
our wet guts of the bog to trail behind and dry slowly and aromatically
in the sun. Many of the families who once cut their own turf, only a
few years ago, now send in machines to do the job for them. It is a
sign of the changing times.
And this is one of the reasons why many of the passengers on the new
Bog Train, every hour on the hour through Blackwater Bog, will be
seeing the bog itself through new eyes. From being a symbol of
backbreaking work that had to be done to keep the home fires burning,
the bogs, for many, have now become mysteriously marshy places, of
sun-dry greens, browns, slick blacks and yellows, places where
custom-built machines growl all day and where men don't walk abroad
anymore with a slean (turf spade) over their shoulders and a sallywood
handle in it to keep their hands cool while the blade dug down and in,
twist and up, time and time again. It is into this world that the Bog
Train is now running across the Blackwater Bog, every hour on the hour.
The Blackwater Bog, about fifteen miles east of Ballinasloe, one of the
big bogs that feeds the Shannonbridge Power Station, is typical enough
of the current state of the central boglands. Millions upon millions
of tons of peat have been machined out of its breast, over the past
thirty years, to keep the power station pluming. Untold millions of
tons remain. But, increasingly, the bog is becoming what they call
Cutaway... the resource is not limitless... and all the acreages of
Cutaway hint strongly at the beginning of the end.
And this, in a way, is why the Bog Train is beginning to puff lightly
and brightly through the heather. In a move which deserves to be
lauded, the management of Bord na Mona have recently begun to encourage
their workers, who have created entire towns in the Midlands by dint
of numbers, to look through the medium-term towards the future of the
bogs. When all will be Cutaway. When the bogs will have been
exhausted. When their will be no more turf for the machines to scrape
away.
As part of that process the Bord has been encouraging some of its
workers to break their total dependence upon the brown stuff. Some
workers, as a result, have become sub-contractors to the Bord rather
than employees. Some have been developing peaty products like peat
moss for gardeners and marketing these. And one group of farsighted
men, on the Blackwater Bog, have begun operating the famous Bog Train.
Which runs every hour, on the hour.
There is, you see, a very extensive narrow gauge railway system through
the bog. It winds here and there, snaking hereabouts and thereabouts,
developed over the years to follow the machines that pursued the rich
banks of peat. It runs through some of the strangest and most
fascinating landscapes in the whole country. Here, there is a bank of
totally undisturbed bog, centuries old, surviving because, maybe the
machines could not reach it. There, nearby, is the flatness of the
Cutaway. Further on still are clumps of exotic trees, planted by the
Bord to see if the Cutaway has any potential for forestry.
A little further on you will se the wonderland of an acre or two
apparently populated only by the crone-headed bog cotton, spun silk on
a spare neck, nodding sagely to every breeze that passes. And there is
even a section along the snaking track which shows the way the bog
preserves its old trees, oak, beech and ash and hazel, all marinated
and blackened and burned by centuries of burial into weird and
wonderful shapes. They alone represent a very special sight, their
hardened arms reaching upwards towards the flat Heaven which hangs over
the Blackwater Bog.
Anyway the group of Blackwater Bogmen, in their wisdom, have launched
the Bog Train as part of their own anti-Cutaway plan. It represents a
splendid bit of clear thinking on their behalf. It represents a new
dimension of amenity for both overseas visitors and locals in the area.
There is special engine and a specially designed fifty-seater coach.
There is literature and full guide service. The trip covers an almost
six-smile circling route through the bog and takes just under an hour.
I have ridden the Bog Train and I will ride it again. Jolting along
through the dead timber roots, past the bog cotton, I was remembering my
own boyhood days in a Fermanagh bog. I remember a spring well where
the water was from the Garden of Eden before the Fall. I remembered
the frog who dwelt at the bottom of that well, looking upwards greenly
through the crystal at the faces of children helping their father to
spread tomorrow's fires today, to warm and brown in the sun.
If you get to the Midlands soon then you must go to the Blackwater Bog.
And you must ride upon the Bog Train. A journey, today, back into
yesterday and the days long before that. Every hour on the hour.
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