This fragile peat dome, halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, is lacerated with a grid of channels, ripped through the fibres of its dark earth.
On a cold wet February day, in a biting wind, the summit of Fannyside Muir is an impressively wide expanse of nodding heather plants, but the prominent leggy heather is not the architect of the bog. A closer look is needed to discern the construction team: the resident array of Sphagnum mosses – a scatter of tightly packed pink hummocks and, in a little pool, a different species, emerald green, sprawling into the icy margins.
The top of the bog was stripped of moss and layers of peat to supply gardeners, and every few metres we have to navigate a brutal straight drain incised into the ground, carrying life-giving water away from the Sphagnum. Not until 2013 was a line drawn under this commercial exploitation, the culmination of a decision chain initiated by European politics and resulting in the legal protection of the southern half of the muir for its rare wintering bean geese.
Peat exploitation was not the only affront to the bog, the northern slopes were drained and skewered with conifers. Fortunately for the snipe – leaping out of, and zigzagging away from, the watery mires as we approach - fires, probably arson, destroyed most of the trees.
The Forestry Commission owns most of Fannyside Muir and, perhaps counterintuitively, has declared it open habitat. The special bog wildlife including large heath butterflies and glossy bog beetles (Agonum ericeti) are safe from afforestation.
Now Buglife, the charity I work for, has, with funding from Wren landfill tax and the EU parliament’s Life fund, started to heal the wounds. There are 1,000 new dams – peat bunds and sheet piling – obstructing the drains and holding 150m more litres of rainwater in the muir. If the Sphagnum continue to recover, they will absorb and safely hold CO2 as well.
We have not always recognised how these humped black sponges help us, and other life, to thrive; hopefully, this is changing.
