I won
a contract with Natural England to monitor the recovery of Bolton Fell Moss, a cut-over bog in the borderlands. I pulled on my wellies and went forth along a peat-baulk, the diggers still there, last few weeks of a shameful six decades that started in 1957. It was great to be involved in such interesting and worthwhile work though I don’t suppose I’ll be around to see whether the restoration is truly successful. It probably took the best part of ten thousand years to form, before the last fifty-six in which it was destroyed.
My carefully-prepared tender had not prepared me for its size, brought home by eight days of traipsing along a peat bund to get to site. After a day or two I noticed the fall of the land to the west, and realised like many of the other border mires, this was a raised bog that escaped its cradle and flowed out over the surrounding land, engulfing all in its path. Not a cause for panic: it probably did so five thousand years ago, and slowly, but an early example of nature turning round and biting us on the bum nevertheless.
It was a rare way to make a living, alone and out there in the flatland without even the sound of a distant train; the only imposition in the entire time a distant field-gun going off at Spadeadam. My high-vis felt incongruous against the russet, straw, indigo. Company policy, even though the last two diggers were a mile away and there was no-one else about. I just couldn’t see how a swing of that arm was going to catch me unawares. The birds were a joy. At plot Russell Three an incessant cuckoo thirty metres away for the entire forty minutes of the quadrat, pleased with himself at being lord of a land so chock full of meadow pipits, a favourite prey. I basked in the certainty of shared experience stretching backwards to the year dot and remember a school trip to Shakespeare. A man running around stage screaming cuckold! cuckold!, with the audience in fits. I have to look it up.
At South Four courting lapwings, again nearby. Divebomb rubbery squeak and tumble; here’s someone who approves of the freshly contoured land surface ponding water and sprouting rushes. I haven’t heard the noise since I last left Teesdale in 2012 and stop to soak it up. In addition to the drunken chuckle I can hear the whoosh of the air through their primaries as they roll away. Needless to say in this wilderness of wet the snipe were drumming too. Praise be that I lived to love this.
Many years ago we were out on a Sunday afternoon, tea in a tea room in Northumberland, the best county for expeditions. On sale were tea towels, one themed on the border clans. And there I was stamped on the linen, arcing across Redesdale. I had noticed on arrival in the north-east in 1990 that I was no longer the sole Hedley, not required to spell it out. Its uniqueness in the south-east had made me embarrassed, a Hedley head sticking up. But Northumberland was awash with Hedleys, so it should have come as no surprise when tracing a family tree to see the eponymous branch petering out in Hexham in 1765 in a butcher, Thomas, a short journey of domestication from Redesdale. I am left to imagine his forebears in land with no clues: crofters, drovers, guides and mercenaries. On the face of it unlikely, I appear to be descended from the moss-troopers and the reivers before them.
I have long toyed with the analogy that the biosphere is like an animal’s pelt: vegetation clothes the whole earth and has a grain, like my friends’ pets. Both are beautiful and have a claim to health. It’s not a very good analogy because a dog’s coat is dead stuff sticking up out of live tissue, and forests and grasslands are live tissue sticking up out of dead stuff, but what appeals is its potential to shock as a metaphor. The earth has been shaved of its forests like a dog in preparation for an operation. The scrublands and grasslands that struggled back have themselves been pulled out and further denuded, leaving scabs. The soil – the epidermis – has wasted away, leaving raw flayed skin. In places like Bolton Fell, the land was deliberately slashed so that the water would bleed out, before great, regular, rectangular chunks of it were peeled off, exposing heaving clay muscle. All a far cry from the glossy shine on a tin of pedigree chum. At one point I stand on a bund along the southern edge and the analogy returns to mind. I can see ground zero beneath me, smears of clay at the base of the peat, land exposed for the first time in ten millennia, and I can see a small slice of the intact land surface away to the west, which was saved in the name of a nature reserve, a bargaining chip. I draw an imaginary contour out from there, a line like that described by a human cannonball, out and across and in front of my face, over the fallen surface, and get a sense of the sheer mass of land removed over those 56 years. The bog is gone, gone, all gone. I conjure up childhood memories of family holidays, of hanging baskets outside manicured pubs in the south, of thatched buildings groaning under the weight of fuchsias, petunias and lobelia. I try to quantify the pleasure they gave, thinking of the cooing of faded elderly relatives. I remember someone aspiring to bloody hanging baskets; they were once expensive, and in my street we contented ourselves with dotting the lobelia round the edges of the lawn. The scales of justice, hanging-basket-shaped, sway. Was it all worth it for that much pleasure? Where is the peat mined for those beautiful hanging baskets now? Scattered to the winds, probably. Nowadays the peat comes from even better bogs in Eastern Europe. Fisons slipped quietly away, embarrassed. We have postcards of the pubs and a big hole in the ground in Cumbria.
The architecture of bog restoration, at least here, involved blocking drains to re-wet, and sculpting the land surface to maximise opportunity for peatland species to thrive. Long depressions now stretch across the bog surface like strings of sausages, each separated from the next by a crescentic dam engineered to hold water and peppered with six or so hummocks, designed, I assume, to maximise the quantity of wet surface peat for bog mosses to make their home. Some of the depressions are bone dry, with the peat cracked and sore, but others have filled up with water, making the site a maze to negotiate. My GPS tells me the next sample, West Three Five, is 169m north-east of here and I set about getting there, lugging the equipment over my shoulder. A pool bars the way and I have to go east instead, as it has the only peat dam in the vicinity that looks solid enough to bear my weight. Once over, I resume north-west, enjoying the stepped trail I am leaving on the screen of the device. And there are Thomas Hedley’s grandfathers and great uncles reluctantly or perhaps not looping back and forth on a drizzly November riding out on small fell ponies zigzagging between patches of sphagnum lawn in amongst the heather, the spiky moor-grass, knowing they have to get to a battered thorn on a rigg of sandstone just disappearing into the twilight but unable to because the surface quakes just that little but too much under the ponies’ hooves for them to slow to a halt. They go back, and find another way through, maybe a couple of cows along for the ride.
Much of the work has been enjoyable. The raw, cracked surface 
has been coated in a mulch of pulverised vegetation scraped from a more extensive bit of bog up in the hills, perhaps planed off to make way for a new moorland road designed to introduce the newly wealthy to the pastime of grouse-shooting with the minimum of inconvenience. Perhaps not. It has been a dry few weeks but some species at least are bedding in: Sphagnum growing from the tiniest fragments and, here and there where moisture levels are just that bit higher, heather seedlings and the tell-tale grasses of old countryside.
Most of West Two is now occupied by a colossal gull roost. As I stalk around I am hit by the smell of guano. The birds rise into the air as one on my approach down one of the long peat baulks and scream the coast. They drift off to a pool further north, leaving me to contemplate their effects on the bog’s recovery. It’s like the parents arriving home next morning after the mother of all teenage piss-ups. Soiled feathers and excrement everywhere, no vegetation to speak of, only the indestructible Campylopus introflexus, a 1930s import from the shores of the southern ocean, and that torn up and discarded, perhaps as the gulls search for leatherjackets. I notice how even the surface of the land is depressed here, and wonder what the collective weight of two hundred gulls does to easily compactable peat. All very depressing, especially as I have to risk life and limb to locate the permanent markers. They invariable fall in the most fetid of pools, with scum. I imagine the schadenfreude of a friend as I fall in.