The Face of the Earth by SueEllen Campbell

Author:SueEllen Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

ON THE SPOT: AT THE BOG ON CÉIDE FIELDS

Gerald Delahunty

I arrive at Céide Fields early on a clear July morning. Yesterday’s drenching rains have vanished, and beyond Céide Cliffs the Atlantic reflects blue sky and willowy cloud. I park and walk into the bog on an asphalt path, a modern version of the oak-plank tracks, toghers, laid down over millennia in bogs throughout Europe. Irish bogs are typically bogach—soft, wet places; in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, “melting and opening underfoot,” intimate and introspective. But today it is dry. Where the turf, as the Irish call peat, pushes out from under the sedges, it is surprisingly dry, hard, brittle, black, even after the rain.

Céide Fields lie about five miles west of the small town of Bally-castle, County Mayo, in the west of Ireland. They are part of the four hundred square miles of blanket bog that stretches over most of northwestern Mayo. Céide (roughly, “cage-uh”) means a hill with a flat top, and the Fields look straight north over the Atlantic, crowning shale and limestone cliffs that are four hundred feet high and three hundred million years old.

Across the Fields, the ling heather flowers are still the dark purple they put on just before coming into full bloom. I roll their rough leaves between my fingers, remembering days working on a midland bog as a twelve-year-old, the hardest work I’ve ever done. Other heathers reveal themselves—I spot a few of the pink bell-like flowers of cross-leaved heath and some bell heather with its needle-fine leaves. I don’t see the sphagnum I have half expected, but the area is open and quite dry. I do find some lichens, perhaps cladonia, but I can’t be sure. I’m hoping to find some orchids and eventually come across a single heath-spotted orchid, Dactylorhiza maculata, called the bog orchid in Irish. Its petals are a rosy white with pink spots. I wander on, feeling the hardy textures of the plants that crowd along the edge of the path. I hear a solitary skylark singing from its camouflage, perhaps just twenty feet away.

The bog that covers Céide Fields rests on soils of ancient woodlands, whose clearance by Neolithic farmers allowed the rain that had been absorbed by the trees to reach the ground. Over the next couple of thousand years, a layer of plant debris developed, and later an impermeable layer of iron pan, perfect for the development of blanket bog. Hummocks, lakes, and islands covered with grasses, mosses, sedges, heathers, heath, rushes, and cottongrasses create a muted brown-green-violet landscape whose horizon is indistinguishable from the clouds on wet days, though tinted here and there by the wind-whipped flags of hare’s tail, bog asphodel, and the insect-ingesting sundews, butterworts, and bladderworts that lurk in bog pools.

Blanket bog shelters and sustains snails and slugs, overwintering Greenland white-fronted geese, red grouse, golden plovers, curlews, snipe, meadow pipits, skylarks, Irish and brown hares, and the frogs that otters come to feast on. Insects abound. Dragonflies, moths, and butterflies visit, though the

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