Burn Edge

Today I walked alone along the Stanegate, the ancient frontier road just south of Hadrian’s Wall (which predates that frontier by a few decades), and on a whim – actually I’d noticed an unexpected gap in the fence – I dipped down into Muckle Moss. The Moss is a superb example of a healthy, functioning valley mire, and the only one in England formed of a series of ridges and crescent-shaped pools, a type more commonly found in Scandinavia. It’s a national nature reserve and open to the public, but you’ll not often see hikers or dog walkers on the mire itself – it’s so thoroughly, wonderfully wet.

After a brief hike up and down a wide ridge of waist-high, unforgiving heather, I began to spot patches of sphagnum mosses as the ground became soggier. I’m no longer a stranger to bog vegetation, and here on Muckle Moss you’ll find all the really good stuff – bog rosemary, cranberry, hare’s-tail cotton-grass, the insectivorous round-leaved sundew – as well as some rare sedges. Only the sphagnum and a few bits of still-leafy cranberry were in evidence this late in winter, but there were plenty of cross-leaved heath and blood-red cotton grasses to add some colour. And as I hit the truly wet ground – the black, spongy peat land – the heather gave way almost completely to sphagnum, the watery wonder moss which (along with the cotton-grass) is largely to blame for the thousands of years of deep, deep peat deposits here. I was stunned, as I always am, by the incredible colours – the lime greens to salmon pinks to ochrous reds, and everything in between – all often displayed by just one species. The effect, when you get to the really good bits – the wide and ancient bog pools – is of an alien planet in miniature, a water-world of weird growths and unearthly life. Here, the tightly packed Sphagnum capillifolium rose in wine-red mounds half a metre high, and the loose, long-leafed and fully-saturated Sphagnum cuspidatum filled the pools from their edges right to their centres. I tried to find a place to stand where the water wouldn’t come over my boot tops, and knelt to take some pics.

As I stood up, a fluttering whiteness caught my eye from a distance away, so I made my waterlogged way towards it, now very much regretting not packing my waterproof trousers. Even quite close it looked just like a clump of hare’s-tail cotton-grass, flowering at least three months too early. As I knelt closer, I saw that the white flowers were in fact feathers, caught at the tip of the cotton-grass stems. The stems were growing out of a pool, which held a further cache of feathers, underwater but immobile, as if held in perfectly clear jelly. Something had lost its life here, but I struggled to marry up what appeared to be jay or magpie feathers with a collection of small, delicate cream-and-grey striped ones. Perhaps two different birds had died here – but I didn’t feel like putting my hand in to move the floating feathers and reveal the corpses underneath.

Instead I made my way towards a wide drain, which in recent years has been modified with a series of dams to retain the water in the mire. The evenly-spaced line of pools this has created are filling rapidly with sphagnum – a positive sign for the health of the mire, meaning it can go on with its age-old task of building peat and storing carbon, so desperately needed now. I was particularly interested in this drain, as some old OS maps show the line of it as coincident with the “Black Dyke”, a seemingly semi-mythical* linear earthwork, and an ancient boundary – maybe even frontier – which ran north to south, and has been said, perhaps doubtfully, to stretch from the Scottish border right down to Allenheads in County Durham. Whether this really was the Black Dyke was not at all clear (it may be, as this blog suggests, that there was no need for a boundary across the bog, which acted as a natural deterrent to advancement), but I liked the idea that this ancient marker – possibly pre-Roman, maybe even older – was now the site of a very modern intervention, brought about by a desire to correct past wrongs done to the mire – draining it, cutting it, burning it. And especially, planting trees on it.

From the drain I walked west along the drier land at the edge of the plantation – a mixed wood of conifer and birch – which abuts the Stanegate, and through which it appeared the “Dyke” must have run. There’s a mute sadness to trees – broadleaf trees that is – growing on bogs. Twisted, misshapen with excrescences, and dirty with lichen and fungi, they appear tired and ill, almost as if the peat has travelled up their xylems and turned their sap sour. It’s not hard to compare this to the growth of Sitka Spruce on peat soils and bogs – they’re all over Northumberland, and they adore soggy conditions, growing tall and strong, to the delight of those who profit from the plantations. Seed dispersal from Sitka is a massive problem around the functioning blanket bogs and mires we have left, requiring many hours of volunteer effort to pull up the ever-sprouting saplings. Some had clearly been removed here, cut at the base at a couple of years old, and laid on their sides. It was a strangely sad sight. Piles of cut birch logs had also been left at some indeterminable time along the edge of the wood, but they appeared bizarrely insubstantial, half-disappearing into the peat, half-consumed by tiny grey elf-cup fungi. The plantation itself – although lacking in full-size trees – was impossibly dense, the understory layer seemingly entirely made of up of twigs and brash – though whether living or not it was hard to tell. I still wanted to find the course of the Black Dyke, and the shelter from the sun would have been, astonishingly for January, quite welcome. But this was not a wood you could saunter through.

The previous day had been even warmer. Feeling the chimerical call of spring, I’d gone at lunch to a park near the city, and sat in the unseasonal heat listening to the remains of a helium balloon trapped in a tree behind me. The sound was as a plastic bag streaming in the wind, but with a metallic crackle to the edge of it, like a worn-out LP played through a cheap amplifier. Here on the Moss the wind was gentle and had nothing to agitate; when I knelt low to the ground to inspect the sphagnum it was like being in a silent, watery world. Having spent a decent amount of wintry time on bogs and moorland, I’m used to hard winds blowing across, unchecked by trees, powerful even low to the ground – and usually accompanied by freezing horizontal rain. This peace was strange – pleasant, but in its way just as nerve-jangling as the constant snapping and crackling of the balloon.

Later on – partly dry but still somewhat boggy in appearance – I spoke to a farmer, who reckoned that the great farming cycle would turn again in ten years time – we’re paid now for the environmental benefit, he said – but by then it’ll all be back to land for food; the environment will go out the window. I thought of the Black Dyke and all the ancient and varying claims to this land; all the violence, actual and implied, and all the uses it has been put to over the millennia: the farming, the parcelling up, the profiteering. I liked the farmer’s no-nonsense amiability about it, but I couldn’t help thinking – wouldn’t it be wonderful if in ten years time we even have a choice to make about the land – a choice which hasn’t been forced on us by the dire global situation we’re creating.

*In her essay “The Marsh and the Visitor”, Alexandra Harris quotes Evelyn Waugh as being healthily sceptical of the history depicted in OS maps: “When I see Gothic lettering on the Ordnance Survey map, I set my steps in a contrary direction”.