Into the Peatlands: A Journey Through the Moorland Year
Robin A. Crawford
Birlinn, £12.99

Rannoch Moor must be one of the scariest places in Scotland. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, Davey Balfour almost meets his death fleeing across this trackless expanse of bogs and lochans. As Robert McFarlane has pointed out, this is partly why it has a ‘reputation for hostility’. Robin Crawford, in this new book on peatlands, describes Rannoch’s ‘predominant colours’ as ‘those of the dead: The withered straw of the Racomitrium grass; the brown of the heather; the grey-white of the crottal- and lichen-covered glacial granite boulders.’ It is no coincidence that Crawford follows his chapter on Rannoch with one called The Supernatural Moor. In Scottish folk stories, moorlands are eerie liminal places, home to faeries, bog people and will-o’-the-wisps, the sort of tricksters who lead the gullible to their doom.

Peatlands also have a more life-preserving and practical role in Scottish culture. Pay a visit to Ness on the Isle of Lewis in midsummer and you might see huge herringbone structures of peat in residents’ back gardens. Crawford takes this as evidence that ‘the ways first established in the ancient transhumance culture are still being practised in the twenty-first century.’ This crofting culture saw families divide their time between winter on the croft and summer out on the moorland, where their cattle and sheep would pasture whilst the children would dance gaily around the shielings. Crawford is a romantic who idealises the crofting life of old. It takes him a good one hundred pages to admit its brutal reality. In the winter, crofters often lived cheek by jowl with their cows in blackhouses. These small stone structures were heated with a central fire. Peat is a notoriously smoky fuel, hence its use in whisky production. ‘Living in smoke-filled accommodation shared with livestock and no running water saw high infant mortality, many mothers dying in childbirth, or fatalities from TB, whooping cough, scarlet fever and measles.’ Oh, for a return to the old ways!

In all seriousness, this is one of many flaws in Crawford’s book. Into the Peatlands is arranged around the four seasons, but this only works when Crawford is writing about the traditional practise of cutting, drying and burning peat. He has to fit his other, loosely-related topics around this, which makes for a more haphazard structure. Also, one senses that Crawford knows there is only so much that can be written about peat.

Perhaps that’s why there’s a long arduous section on ‘transporting the peats’ or a paragraph on a notorious crime of passion that has only a tenuous relation to peat: the poor victim only happened to be standing next to a peat stack when she was shot. With this in mind, it is odd that Crawford should neglect to mention Seamus Heaney. Any book on bogs that includes an extract from a DEFRA report but nothing from Heaney’s pen is not going to win many prizes.

All this is not to say Crawford’s principal subject is mundane. If it was, 13% of Scotland’s landmass would have to described as incalculably boring. On the contrary, one of peat’s many fascinating qualities is its capacity for preserving whatever is sucked into its morass. The Tollund Man, a fellow from the 4th Century BC, was found perfectly mummified in a Danish bog in 1950. (Heaney, by the way, wrote a poem about him). As Crawford points out, peatlands are natural time capsules. Scientists can use the preserved flora and fauna to recreate models of the landscape going back 10,000 years.

Nuggets of information like this, and Crawford’s unbounded enthusiasm, prevent Into the Peatlands from becoming tedious. There are also some lucid sections on how lowland moors were subject to erasure with the advances of industrial agriculture. One of the more uplifting stories here concerns Advocate and philosopher Lord Kames.

In the aftermath of the failed Jacobite uprising, Kames offered displaced Highland clansmen land on Blairdrummond Moss, near Stirling. Giving the Highlanders permission to clear peatland and establish agricultural production allowed them ‘entry into mainstream European civic society, even if it was at the very bottom – and he did so on what were better terms than they had previously enjoyed, even in their clan lands.’ In chapters like this, Crawford conveys a vital truth: that a sophisticated knowledge of peatlands is crucial if we are to understand the complex relationship between people and place.

On the whole, however, this book is a wayward attempt to tackle a difficult subject. There is also a predominance of sloppy writing: countless examples of fudged sentences, inconsistencies of style, and platitudes about Scotland. Take this, where Crawford discusses the declivities between the Highlander and Lowlander. ‘The “Lowlander” can be Scot, Roman, Viking or Englander, but suppression of the Highlander is always the aim. It is naive to think that this no longer goes on today, sometimes consciously, but mostly unthinkingly. We Scots are children of a fractured history, victims of bullying who can ourselves bully those even gentler than ourselves.” Putting the prose to one side, surely Scotland has moved on from this kind of useless self-victimisation?

The publisher, Birlinn, has for a long time been producing beautifully designed books full of nuanced and intelligent writing. Into the Peatlands has the design. It is elegant and contains some fine illustrations, but the writing falters too often. This is a shame, especially as one senses there is a truly excellent book here, waiting to emerge from within its own pages.