![]() ![]() Such plants can retain up to twenty times their own weight in water, meaning that bogs can be composed of 95 per cent water (Aldhouse-Green 2016). Their large, empty porous cells are designed to act as a sponge: conveying water to the chlorophyllous cells that initiate photosynthetic activity, enabling the plant to grow autonomously (Godwin 2009: 69). These plants are formed of a main stem with smaller branches and a tightly formed head (a capitulum, see Laine et al. Only certain types of plants can tolerate the nutrient-poor environment, principally bog mosses ( Sphagna). They are thus known as ‘oligotrophic’ (Godwin 2009: 6) or ‘ombrotropic’ bogs (van der Sanden 1996: 22) and since they lack the ameliorating effect of any carbonate-rich groundwater are exclusively acidic. If the centre of this fen peat becomes completely cut off from the surrounding groundwater, it can be transformed into a ‘raised bog’, creating a lenticular appearance.īog peat meanwhile is more climate dependent: it only forms in areas of high rainfall and is sustained by rain or snowfall with low mineral content (Godwin 2009: 6). As they grow, such hollows can become completely filled with plant remains. Low-lying, constantly flooded areas such as this are often described not just as fens but mires they are often alkaline, due to the influence of calcareous groundwater but certain local rock formations can produce acidic fen peats (Godwin 2009: 5). These environments are initially characterised by sedges, reeds and some bulrushes, while the growth of peat begins to permit shrubs such as sallow, hairy birch and alder to colonise, developing into fen woods with alder, oak and ash joining the smaller tree cover (Godwin 2009: 4). Plant matter dies and falls in at its edges, creating a stagnant pool of water in the centre with a recognised hydrosere – a progression of plant colonisation and growth (Godwin 2009: 4). It tends to form in a damp depression, being heavily determined by the local micro-topography. In order to understand the contexts of bog bodies, we must first draw a distinction between the two main types of peat formation: fen and bog peat.įen peat develops in contact with groundwater, and continues to be fed by inorganic minerals from the surrounding subsoil, thus being known as ‘minerotrophic’ (Chapman and Gearey 2013) or ‘eutrophic’ (Godwin 2009: 5). Topography, drainage, vegetation cycles, land ownership and agricultural histories must all be considered on a case-by-case basis, which require detailed investigation (Chapman and Gearey 2013). Wetter phases after this threshold (notoriously a climatic downturn in the later Bronze Age and early Iron Age) have exacerbated both bog growth and human reactions to it (Godwin 2009), but these are complicated in later prehistory by local variation. ![]() Bog peat growth in north-western Europe began around 5000 BC, coinciding with the onset of higher rainfall and more humid conditions known as the ‘Atlantic’ phase. Peat can grow at variable rates: Godwin ( 2009) records 6 cm per century at Scaleby Moss (Cumbria) compared with 3.3 cm at Red Moss (Lancashire), within the UK. Highly humified peat contains well-decomposed plant matter that has created a dark-brown, blackish amorphous mass, but where plant remains are still identifiable it is described as poorly humified (van der Sanden 1996: 21). Peat forms under waterlogged conditions where plant matter grows faster than it can decay, due to an oxygen-excluding environment that slows the normal breakdown of organic matter (van der Sanden 1996: 21). This chapter attempts to achieve the same re-envisioning of the bog, through palaeoenvironmental, archaeological and archival evidence. ![]() He did not shy away from their dangers but showed how such fear could be mobilised in the cultural imagination, while also bringing to light its riches and treasures. Heaney brought a dwelling eye to the place, making us see them again, not as a marginal landscape or cultural backwater, but as the place he was born and brought up: an omphalos, the navel of the world that surrounded it (Heaney 2002: 1). Yet those poems also made people look again at the bog landscape. If the iconic work by Glob ( 1971) brought the bog bodies into the public light, Heaney’s poems magnified their meaning, giving them a contemporary resonance. Of the bogs he once said, ‘It is as if I am betrothed to them’, remembering an earthy ‘initiation’ of swimming in a moss hole, from which he emerged steeped in the peat, marked from then on by ‘this hankering for the underground side of things’ (Heaney 2002: 5–6). Though ‘bawn’ is the anglicised word for a cattle enclosure, the notion of his being ‘moss-born’ seems fitting. Derry, located at the edge of bogland near Lough Beg (Heaney 1980). ![]() Mossbawn is the name of Seamus Heaney’s family home: a farm in Co. ![]()
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