A summer or two ago we cut peat in a nearby bog. It was the first time the house has been running on oil in a few years, but we like an open fire and there’s nothing like peat, from its smell to its gentle heat. My daydreams got me thinking, today is Earth Day.
Sod laying was a ritual, a culture, a craft that predated many of our other rural ways of life. Over the course of several weeks we rotated it to let it dry and then trampled it to allow more drying. Peat in the Midlands, where the great bogs lie, is part of the way people live.
Getting deep into the bog, mouse deep, working in the ground at the level of the little creatures, a man can see many things: the slinking of a newt, the running of a beetle. All around is nature.
That summer we worked on the lawn in a trinity of jobs, my father on my right and my sister on my left. We entered the lawn and built them into little pyres where they could continue to dry.
As far as I remember, we talked about everything at work. Once I met a man who was searching for treasure in swamps and found a hoard of Celtic swords and chalices.
It is in these bottomless, damp bogs, as Seamus Heaney wrote, that our intimate life takes place, or rather our bottomless life. Because when we dig up, we find new things, new old things, to be precise. In finding the sword, this man had stumbled upon the harvest of this land and made the invisible visible.
Many try to bury things, erase them from memory, but in this country it’s the other way around. We get to know ourselves better as we descend the ditch.
The moors evoke poetry in the Celtic soul. Just think of Heaney’s The Tollund Man knowing that these peat centers hold a special place of honor.
With the pictures of the flat land that the poet weaves, we find that his last meal was a gruel of winter seeds lodged in his stomach.
In these old parishes, Heaney felt both at home and a stranger.
Watching Manchán Magan’s bog series on TG4, I learned that our bogs formed 10,000 years ago and that bogs cover one-sixth of the country.
In the fascinating documentary, Magan describes how a bog used to be 10 meters high but was cut away in the 70 to 80 years of harvest. It was a really frightening fact.
But this digging, this digging, this poetic craft is changing. According to Magan, Bord na Móna now has wind farms in many swamp areas.
I was filming at one of these locations at Christmas and the sight of the change was stark – the moor was now like a vast inland sea, the heady days of his work over.
This soil that had known forests and trees, life and then decay, was now changing again, morphing into another form, a new twenty-first century form.
Moore made the name of the people. Check out Green Party leader Eamon Ryan’s recent announcement about the swamps (and the uproar that followed). And there have been other politicians, other leaders who have championed the Moors or slandered them.
The Taoiseach and the Tánaiste both interfered in the recent debate, and turf wars, as the media put it, erupted across the country.
The moor is both a place of art and a place of politics. As we worked on the lawn that summer day, I wasn’t thinking about politics. I was busy grappling with the peat pillars in front of me. In the distance, swamp cotton fluttered in the light breeze, and my father told me it was a rare sight.
I was 10 years away from the turf in Australia and Canada, but now I was back to stepping on and clamping and loading and burning those old things. We met people on the moor that day and started talking about nature and agriculture and God – titanic topics in a titanic landscape.
When it came time to bring the turf home, help was assembled and trailers loaded and we returned the material to where it now sits in the shed, waiting to be burned on a cold winter’s evening. It can warm a sick animal, it can warm a newborn baby.
However, I know that times are changing, that we need to limit our emissions. We must try to achieve at least 1.5 degrees global warming in the next ten years; We know that two degrees of global warming will cause major problems.
Life is complex, but it’s never been different.
Turf may be on the way out, but it’s given us so much. I wonder if poems are written about the windmills in the peatlands. Perhaps she is now writing the Heaney of the 21st century.
The natural heritage of this earth is the best gift we can give to the next generation. Let us hope that these sonnets are ones in which the earth is happy and healthy, in which we have met the challenges of this day.
Our backs were broken on the moor that day; We were born-again Celts looking into the earth for more meaning, but the earth I see now is also looking back at us. Lawn is old, lawn is new. The lawn is deep.
Deeper than many of us really realize. Times are changing, as Bob Dylan said. Let’s see what happens to this rich country of poetry and politics.
https://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/digging-deep-in-irelands-bogs-to-unearth-a-sense-of-the-poetry-and-politics-of-turf-41575815.html Dig deep into Ireland’s moors to discover a sense of the poetry and politics of turf
