The corner of Scotland spanning Caithness and Sutherland holds more than 400,000 hectares of blanket bog. In Europe’s largest expanse of this habitat, some of the Flow Country peat has been found to be 10 metres deep and to have accumulated over a period of five to six thousand years. This vast place is joining The Grand Canyon and The Great Barrier Reef as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The sphagnum mosses that make up the bog need still water, cool weather and regular showers and can hold up to ten times their dry weight in water, remaining wet long after surrounding soil has dried out. Historically these plants have been used as an antiseptic and absorbent wound dressing, making the Flow Country an important exporter of moss during World War I. When the lower parts die back, the mosses and other plants are preserved in waterlogged, acidic conditions, forming layers of peat which build about a millimetre per year if allowed to lie undisturbed.

Peat is more efficient at storing carbon than woodland. The Flow Country alone stores more than all British woodland and forests put together. But if it should dry out, this carbon will instead be released into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, worsening the future climate scenario.

The Flow Country balances on this fulcrum of threat and hope and so is prompting urgent action. In 1995 the RSPB bought Forsinard Estate a little north of Kinbrace (as well as some other pockets of land which make their total reserve 22,000 hectares). In an effort to address peat degradation, they are returning it to an open landscape and raising water levels. They calculate that rewetting strategies have already made a difference and at present the Flow Country is retaining more carbon than it emits.

The Flow CountryThe Flow Country (Image: Linda Cracknell)

I visited Forsinard just before my departure on foot from Kinbrace, wilting in heat as I crossed the bog on a boardwalk. Lizards lounged on it. Dragonflies glinted. I’d last climbed the high observatory here on a frigid February day when snow highlighted mossy bridges between black pools – the dubh-lochain. A few metres of elevation allow us to appreciate such flatlands. On this July day the dance of bog cotton was joyful. The pools, offered up by platforms of peat at different levels, reflected bright blue sky rimmed with colourful moss cushions and golden grasses. Spires of yellow bog asphodel seemed to challenge the usual adjectives for this treeless terrain – desolate, lonely, isolated, bleak.

Down again beside a pool, I dropped to my knees to hold a hand-lens above a plump hummock tightly packed with florets of red sphagnum moss. There are three predominant types in the Flow Country and this one was acute-leaved bog-moss or Sphagnum capillifolium. In magnification, a forest of succulent serrated branches glistened, jellyish in pink and russet translucence. Pulling out a single strand I found a darker spore cup on the floret and a tangle of shiny arms curling towards its base. A riddle spoke itself: what is plant but mostly water? When I looked up from this minia�ture magic through a low jungle of bog-bean – each plant doubled in height by its reflection – the whole western vista was backed by the rise of two interleaving peaks, the Ben Griams. Miniature and magnitude. Why do we think of this landscape as boring?

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The hot, dry months across Scotland before my visit had also created some areas of crazed bare peat. Since my earlier walks, the climate crisis has roared into centre-stage, demanding action as, in the summer of 2023, fires burn around the world and floodwaters rise. It’s predicted that nine out of ten Alpine glaciers will have melted by the end of this century. Since 2008 when, in the footsteps of my father, I walked the longest glacier in the Alps, the Aletsch has dramatically ‘ablated’, shrinking up to 50 metres in length each year and retreating at its edges. Perhaps the prints and markers of both mine and, 56 years before me, my father’s way will already have been fully erased.

Linda Cracknell in the Flow CountryLinda Cracknell in the Flow Country

I was learning now that in the Flow Country context, wet is good, but drought or lengthy periods of low rainfall are becoming increasingly common in Scotland. Peatland here was degraded in the 1980s by being drained and ploughed for vast swathes of non-native conifer, controversially driven by government tax breaks for the wealthy including Terry Wogan and Alex Higgins. These incentives were awarded despite the fact such trees don’t thrive on peat-rich soil. It prompted land rights activist Andy Wightman to ask why the government didn’t simply give the money as grants to the crofters, farmers and landowners in Caithness and Sutherland so that they could plant the forests. This gold rush cultivation led to a bitter battle between commercial foresters and conservationists who foresaw that the peat bog would die and, with it, wildlife.

Peat bogs became mired in capitalism.

The RSPB and other organisations involved in peatland restoration are now reversing the process: felling conifers, blocking drainage channels to raise the water levels, filling in the furrows and monitoring the sites for conifer regrowth. They hope to encourage back peaty pools and bog plant life, the complexity and beauty of a natural landscape, and as a result enhance biodiversity and ecosystem resilience.

Acting to achieve net-zero by 2045, the Scottish Government is also offering £30 million in funding streams for investment in peatland restoration. Carbon ‘offsetting’ benefits have driven up land prices in the Flow Country. The beneficiaries of the earlier tax breaks for planting conifer may now benefit financially from felling them. Land reform campaigners see this as a worsening of already disas�trous inequalities in Scottish land ownership patterns.

I wondered. If the Flow Country, or its sphagnum mosses, were assigned ‘rights of nature’, what would they sue for? Perhaps to be allowed to live and layer and gather water and not be pushed into this use or that Monopoly-board status. Or they’d demand that humans reverse global heating. Or, perhaps, ask the world to measure time in metres of peat rather than by human years.

I looked back at my adversary, the bog, clamped down by mist. It was still unreadable, this sometime-ground, sometime-wa�ter place, just intent on being itself. Not hostile, as I had begun to think, now that I could smile back at it.

Wise in its depths and generous in its abilities to cleanse, it absorbs water, stores carbon and holds in preservation memories, boats, bones. I refuse to regard it as ‘useless’ despite its indifference to humans. As well as these wide, unnerving expanses, it offers us hope.

Doubling Back: Paths Trodden in Memory by Linda Cracknell is published by Saraband