I am not the only one inspired by peat...

By Dr Jennifer Jones

Scientist and nature writer 

Days are lengthening, spirits dampened by the tail end of winter are rising, and for many, thoughts are turning to their gardens. Plans are made for garden centre visits, seeds to be sown, and compost to be bought. And it’s the compost I am concerned with today – or at least peat that might lurk there. 

My passion for peat began on a cold, windswept Pennine moor, when I watched a professor coring through a bog. As he withdrew the core, we were looking at 500 years of history. The peat at the bottom of the core was there at the end of the Middle Ages, while nearer the surface the peat had captured the pollutants of the Industrial Revolution. I was beguiled. Since then, I have gazed on many moorlands with their bobbing heads of cotton grass, or green lawns of Sphagnum mosses, the so-called bog mosses. 

Much later, I visited a peatland owned by a compost-making company. In contrast to the beauty of that Pennine moorland, here I was gazing on a black desert. All the surface peat had been mined to provide peat-based compost for both amateur gardeners and professional horticulturalists. It felt like an assault. 

Why should we care about peat? It’s just black, wet stuff, isn’t it? No! It’s much more than that. Peat bogs are important habitats, stores of specialised biodiversity, from dragonflies through to the carnivorous sundew plant. Nowadays, peat has a greater role to play. Firstly, it captures carbon, and lots of it - peatlands store one-third of the world’s soil carbon. Peat is also an archive. You may remember the discovery of a bog body on Lindow Bog in Cheshire in 1984. It was challenging to date Lindow Man, but it is believed that he was thrown into the bog sometime between 2BC and 119AD. The peat had preserved him until his body was exposed by peat diggers.

 
I am not the only one inspired by peat. The poet Seamus Heaney wrote eloquently about it; the writer Alys Fowler’s book Peatlands has been short-listed for the Richard Jeffreys prize; and peat was the main character in the Scottish writer Donald Murray’s memoir The Dark Stuff. Peat also features in the craft of artists with Bob Speers, Northern Irish musician and artist, actually painting with peat. 

Peatlands are found around the world, predominantly in the Northern hemisphere, but also occur in tropical areas. The largest tropical peatland found to date is in the Congo Basin. The peat is 7 metres thick, covers an area the size of England, and is believed to be 42,000 years old! The bog locks in 30 billion tonnes of carbon, making the region one of the most carbon-rich ecosystems on Earth. This is equivalent to three years’ worth of global fossil fuel emissions.

We have not been good at caring for our peat bogs. In 2024, it was reported that peatlands were degrading in 177 countries around the world. Various factors account for this, but mainly drainage for agriculture, urbanisation, deforestation and diverse industrial activities. Not only is this destruction of an important habitat, it also represents a tremendous loss of carbon, putting climate goals at risk. The problem with peat is that it grows slowly, very slowly - in fact, it grows at about 1mm per year – so if we destroy peat, it takes an age to regrow. 

The UK government recognises the risk to our peatlands, so, since 2024, no compost sold in England and Wales should contain peat. Unfortunately, the picture is less clear with respect to the use of peat by professional horticulturalists. Successive governments have put back the date by which horticulturalists should stop using peat. Last October, the current government stated that it was committed to ending the sale of peat, but they have yet to set a date. The horticultural industry uses a massive 760,000 cubic meters of peat per year: that’s enough to fill 300 Olympic swimming pools.

 
Fortunately, there is good news, both at home and overseas. Here in the UK, many projects are dedicated to restoring degraded peatlands or to granting those designations which should help to protect them. Here in the north-west, last year a new National Nature Reserve was established. This was the Risley, Holcroft and Chat Moss National Nature Reserve. The sites will be restored to provide habitat for important species such as curlew, lapwings, sundew and adders. Risley is the nearest to the archdiocese. Why not pay a visit to this important ecosystem? 

Historically, bogs have been associated with memory and spirituality, thin places linking the physical with the transcendent, of uniting the past with the present. I, too, find them places of deep contemplation, of somewhere that connects me with Creation, places of prayer. On the Day of Prayer for Care of Creation in 2022 Pope Francis spoke of Mother Earth: “she weeps and implores us to put an end to our abuses and to her destruction”. He may not have meant peatlands specifically, but it is vital that we conserve them.