Flow Country awarded UNESCO World Heritage status – guest post by Linda Cracknell

Posted on July 29, 2024

Spending five days last year walking in Scotland’s far north ‘Flow Country’, camping along the way, I was often awed amidst stark beauty, and occasionally a little alarmed by my own scale against the non-human expanse.

I’m thrilled to hear that as of the 26th July 2024, the Flow Country joins the Grand Canyon and St Kilda as a UNESCO World Heritage Site – the first peatland to do so. Host to carnivorous plants, sphagnum mosses, rare birds and broad horizons, just to know that this vast and intact blanket bog exists on our island is reassuring. But now, greater profile and recognition should make it understood better and protected more; a huge carbon store also contributing to our future resilience in the face of the climate crisis.

 

‘I was knee-deep in water. A footfall earlier I’d stood on something like land. Panting, drenched and disorientated, I glared across a muted terrain rolling off each way into mist. There were no features on which to hook my eye.

This place didn’t care about me. With ultimate indifference it shrugged itself down into a sullen spread of water and mossy peat. I was exhausted and agitated since I’d been pushed off my route by a burn in spate, and unsure exactly where I was on the soggy map I held. A compass fixed on a westerly bearing was in the other hand.

‘Get across the burn, then go west,’ I’d instructed myself, repeating it aloud as if to divert alarm. But I had expected to see a road by now.

I tried to persuade variations in colour or texture into features, contrived a shiny strip of horizontal road from light catching yet another pool. Earlier a single fence post had summoned me – a fellow vertical outlined by vast sky. I greeted it but it muttered no clues. I was alone, stumbling unevenly between tussocks and like one of those film characters lost in the desert, talking to myself, hallucinating almost.

This was the fifth and last day of my trip and, until diverted, I’d been close to arrival at the much-imagined hospitality of the Crask Inn, an ‘oasis’ on the A836 between Lairg and Altnaharra. In my anxious state, I ignored the dizzying strata of stories beneath my feet. Yet quaking down there beyond my note were layers of sphagnum moss doused with epochs of rain. Amidst them might be hair of reindeer, wolf, brown bear, a stray wild boar tusk caught amongst moss spores and ancient pollen grains. There could be volcanic ash, a logboat, the spoke of a wooden wheel, a human body even. A vertical history book reached deep into the black peat, a territory that had taken thousands of years to develop. Perhaps, archived at its base, were remains of the first lichens, mosses and trees to colonise the land after the glaciers retreated, starting a process towards what it has become: Europe’s largest blanket bog.

My thoughts did not delve into this past, but nor did I acknowledge the bog and its moss for its critical role in our future – as a species, as a world. A future that currently mires it in words like ‘sequestration’, ‘investment’, ‘credit’, ‘ownership’.

In my panicky state suspended above the bog and banished from my human world I felt that I might plunge hat-deep, following any number of characters from eerie tales of squelch, fog and underworld.’

From the chapter ‘In Deep: Time and Saturation in the Flow Country’ published in Doubling Back: Paths Trodden in memory by Linda Cracknell.

Linda Cracknell is a writer of narrative non-fiction on the natural world, as well as of fiction and radio scripts. Her first story collection was nominated for a Saltire Award (now Scotland’s National Book Awards) and the Robin Jenkins Award for environmental writing, and her essay collection Doubling Back: Ten Paths Trodden in Memory, about journeys she took on foot in Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, and Kenya, was serialised for BBC Radio as a Book of the Week. All of Linda’s writing is inspired first and foremost by place, and she teaches creative writing, especially nature and place writing.

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Learn more about this wondrous landscape in Doubling Back: Paths Trodden in memory by Linda Cracknell and Peat and Whisky: The Unbreakable Bond by Mike Billett.