John Feehan presented this essay as his keynote address at the Tóchar: A Path from the Past, A
Future for Wetlands conference held in Abbeyleix, County Laois on the 22nd May 2025. Read the full speech here.
I was born the same year as Bord na Móna; and our shared
birthday gives me a span of years sufficient to appreciate the scale of
change in the peatland landscape since the great industrial machines
began to strip the bogs of their once-off harvest.
When I was young we cut our own turf in Clonoghil Bog outside
Birr (the last intact raised bog to be taken into production by Bord na
Móna). Back then it still had a lake at its heart, with a fringing forest
of royal ferns taller than our young heads and patrolled by the first
dragonflies to fire my young imagination. I remember, almost to the point
of still hearing them now, the last nightjars flickering among the heather
and between the pines at dusk, on turf-cutting early summer evenings.
When I left Birr to make my way in the world it never crossed my mind
that when I returned the nightjar would be gone: that I would never hear
it again. I don’t think we ever really imagined that not only would the
nightjar disappear, but that the bog itself would be gone in our lifetime.
Because back then the bogs went on forever. I don’t have the
words to give you any real sense of the extraordinary places these bogs
were before we began to exploit them on an industrial scale: the immense
silence and sense of solitude, the total absence of a human presence
except along the fringes where turf was cut by hand; the sheer wonder of
the lives of the plants and animals that made their homes here.
Looking back on that time in later years, Professor J.J. Moore, who
spent a lot of time walking the bogs in the 1950s and 60s studying their
flora, remembered what it was like before systematic mechanical cutting
began (This is from a talk he gave in the 1980s):
an experience which it is impossible to have anymore – the
experience of being isolated in a vast brown ocean of bog, extending to the
horizon on all sides, where the only landmarks were church steeples. One
always needed to carry a compass in these vast areas. This experience can
no longer be enjoyed since all these larger bogs of up to 10km diameter
have now been cut. At present we have no undrained raised bog left which
is more than 300 ha in extent.
So much of the natural wonder of the bog was unseen, unheard
by us then, preoccupied as we were with the exhausting exhilaration of
harvesting the turf. It only began to come into focus on subsequent visits
years later, when the spread-ground had taken on the abandoned feel of
a school playground during the summer holidays – except that here there
would never again be a return to life and laughter in September.