Colm O'Regan: Bog air should be bottled and labelled with fancy writing to be sold in delis
Bog At On His O'regan Reflects The Spent Days Colm
The Bog. There aren’t many places like it in Ireland. Where the land goes on for, if not forever, then at least quite a while. Last weekend was a good weekend to be on the bog and scratching my ‘beshortsed’ leg on a bit of bog heather brought back little dry sods of memory of similar scratches.
Last Saturday’s bog was at the Lough Boora Discovery Park in Offaly but we used to have a bit of bog up in, well the Boggeraghs. Up beyond Nad (for people living north of the 52 and a quarterth parallel, Nad is a real placename in Cork).
Anyway, somewhere up there on the high plains was a small bank of turf that my father rented and cut for years and then one summer he finished the last piece of the cake. Its remains are probably buried under sitka spruce now — like most things were in the ’90s when most people thought that mountain bogs were useless. My father would go up first to cut the turf and the rest of us would help with the stooking (or footing as you may have heard it called). Then it would be loaded into a tractor-trailer.
Part of the turf ceremony was enticing Zephyr, our then border collie, into the house to stop her from following the tractor and trailer all the way to Nad. Which she had done a few times. About 10 miles. Which is a long journey in dog-years.
I won’t exaggerate the extent of bog-work I did. I was either too young or too useless to do much. I definitely stooked turf. I remember midges. And the nicest tay and sandwiches you could have. Bog air should be bottled and labelled with fancy writing so that you can buy it on the way out of delis.
CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB
But I was wise enough to tell people I had summers on the bog anyway.
It is estimated that 103% of the Irish population have claimed to have spent summers on the bog (the same percentage incidentally who claim studying Peig put them off Irish).
I thought about all of this on a hot May Saturday this year. Boora is a raised bog that got cut away decades ago and was largely left alone.
Not completely left alone obviously. You need some way of getting around it. And some little paddocks are managed for grey partridges. Though curiously, I didn’t see one pear tree.
And even though the original raised bog is gone, so it’s not pristine, there are plenty of places where you can look at what nature looks like when it’s left be.
It’s not the Serengeti. There aren’t vast herds of gnu. But what was very obviously there were lots of insects and birds and, I’m told lurking are, plenty of hares and badgers and the odd goat. Enough to make you think about how much nature you thought you were looking at before.
It is said about Ireland that the reason we don’t really appreciate nature is that we don’t really know what it looks like.
We see green things but most of us don’t routinely get to be in places that are crawling with life.
I’m not a naturalist but my ears are good with volume and I have rarely heard birdsong as loud as I heard in Boora. Proper wildlife documentary surround sound loud.
Butterflies and damsons and dragonflies thronged the paths, flitting just ahead as if they wanted us to follow. Like little spirits, no doubt luring us somewhere to work for the fairies in their mines. But we were happy enough to go along.
After a winter of vandalised ditches around the country it was a real tonic.
And crucially, too early in the year for midges. But not for tay.
