opportunities for a wealth of species as well as a feast for the eyes and ears. A walk through Ballycon Bog during May will yield vistas of extensive bog cotton with breeding lapwing calling happily amidst a frame of birch woodland. And so, the bogs that had become electricity and heating, and supporting systems for tomato plants, are now the newborn wetland and woodlands mosaic within this rapidly changing landscape.
Because of the extent of the Bord na Móna lands – in the region of 80,000 ha, or thereabouts – there is room for everything. Local community walkways, targeted management for rare and ‘on the brink’ species like grey partridge, ecotourism, renewables in the shape of wind turbines and solar panels (you must produce electricity somehow!), and the space and solitude for true – what could be called – wilderness.
My own involvement in these landscapes began in the mid-1990s, when as a research student I was tasked with giving 6,500 ha of Bord na Móna industrial cutaway blanket bog, a helping hand ‘back to nature’. This was in the west of Ireland close to what is now referred to as the Wild Atlantic Way. The approach I took was to observe what happened when the cutaway bog was left to nature’s devices. What I found was that heavily modified landscapes do need a helping hand – especially those bare industrial cutaways of the west. Drain blocking, creating berms to hold water and allowing time for recovery proved to be the best approach. We worked together – nature and I – along with great support from the Mayo bogmen who drove the diggers and excavators, to rewet and rehabilitate the land. When the last drain was blocked, we let go of expectations and left the pockets of bog-moss to grow. And it does, slowly, steadily.
Next to the Midlands, in the mid-2000s, to basically do the same again, albeit on a grander scale. I began a journey of walking through those far less dramatic and exposed industrial bog units, learning from where peat fields had been taken out of production, and imagining how things would be when the Bord na Móna machines passed through that last time on their rehabilitation run. Where the deeper peat layers are exposed by industrial peat production, fen communities establish with fringes of birch. Where deep peat remains, these are the places where a bit of extra effort can recreate those sphagnum-dominated habitats and true bog formation can be restored.
Like in Ballydangan Bog in County Roscommon. Here, the Bord na Móna ploughs barely scratched the surface and this allowed the active raised bog to persist while peat harvesting continued in neighbouring bogs. Ballydangan Bog also acted as a space for the extremely rare Irish red grouse to persist, despite its disappearance from the surrounding bogs. The local gun club and wider community have taken charge here, working to control the fiercely unbalanced predator effect and sustain curlew and grouse, thankfully, successfully and promisingly.
The rehabilitation and restoration work on the Bord na Móna lands today is being coordinated by a small group of ecologists working with a wider team of bog engineers, project managers, surveyors and machine drivers. And, let’s not forget the finance people. But those who drained the bogs – the true bogmen – are critical to the successful post-peat phase. Draining a bog for decades creates an understanding of hydrology, and the fundamentals of ecology. Blocking drains, raising outfalls, turning off pumps – it’s all part of enabling the future.
The work to date has been truly transformative, with values for carbon, water, people, renewable energy and nature. With barely 15% of the lands rehabilitated or restored so far, and another 60,000 ha to go, who knows what benefits are to come? The network of sites across the Irish Midlands will link up other state and privately owned lands zoned for nature, and while people will have their place, it will be alongside thousands of species that will find space in an otherwise crowded-out-by-agriculture landscape. Some people talk about the possible return of the great bittern, lost to the wetland drainage of the last century. Others talk about reintroducing the crane. But maybe they’ll find these wetland-woodland mosaics on their own, along with who knows what other species.
Let’s leave that door, and our minds, open.
Four-spotted chaser, Whixall.
The key to landscape-scale rewilding of damaged wetlands is the restoration of the hydrological conditions necessary for their long-term self-maintenance. For 27 years, I have been lucky enough to lead Natural England/Natural Resources Wales’s rewilding of the centre of Fenn’s, Whixall, Bettisfield, Wem and Cadney Mosses Special Area of Conservation (the Marches Mosses), which straddles the English/Welsh border near Whitchurch in Shropshire, and Wrexham.
Over the last 10,000 years, a 1,000-ha rainwater-fed lowland raised bog climax community has developed there because of the amazing powers of sphagnum bog-moss. This has created cold-water-logged, nutrient-poor, acidic conditions: pickling a peat dome, 10 m higher than the current flat, drained landscape – swallowing up the wildwood and spreading over the plain of glacial outwash sand, to the limits of its enclosing moraines.
However, for the last 700 years, this huge wilderness has been drained for agriculture, peatcutting, transport systems and more recently forestry and even a scrapyard. By 1990, the centre of the moss had a peat-cutting drain every 10m and mire plants and animals had been eradicated from most of the site. Nationally, less than 4% of lowland raised mires were left in good condition by then: consequently, many raised bog plants and animals are internationally rare and raised bog is one of Europe’s most threatened habitats.
A large increase in the rate of commercial peatcutting in the late 1980s led NGOs to form the Peatlands Campaign Consortium, to save the Mosses and others like it. The campaign was driven by Shropshire Wildlife Trust’s (SWT) local volunteer Jess Clarke. North Wales Wildlife Trust staff, including myself, and SWT staff, aided by brave Nature Conservancy Council staff, particularly Mark July and Paul Day, pushed to get the government to take on the restoration of this devastated site. The realisation that there was not enough raised bog in good condition to meet Britain’s international conservation obligations, combined with the new peat-extraction company finding that the Mosses’ peat quality was inadequate to meet their site-rental costs, resulted in the Nature Conservancy acquiring the centre of the Moss in 1990.
Cowberry.
Since then, Natural England and Natural Resources Wales have been doggedly acquiring more of the bog, clearing smothering trees and bushes, damming ditches and installing storm-water control structures. SWT mirrored this on the smaller Wem Moss, at the south of the peat body. The knowledge of our local team of ex-peatcutters, particularly Bill Allmark, and Andrew and Paul Huxley, has been invaluable in understanding how to reconstruct the Mosses.
In 2016, a land-purchase opportunity led to a successful funding bid by a partnership of Natural England, NRW and SWT for the five-year, €7-million European and Heritage Lottery-funded Marches Mosses BogLIFE Project, which aims to make a step change in the rate of rewilding of the Mosses.
Importantly, the project addresses a problem affecting all British raised mires – the loss of our mire-edge ‘lagg’ (fen, carr and swamp communities), whose high-water table sustains the water table in the mire’s central expanse. Restoring the lagg involves buying marginal forests and woodland and clearing their smothering trees, buying fields, disconnecting their under-drainage, stripping their turf and reseeding with mire species. A new technique of linear cell damming or ‘bunding’ the peat then restores water levels. Lagg streams, canalised within the peat during the
