Words & Art
Professor Roxane Andersen: Author
The Special Blanket
In the north of Scotland, ten thousand years ago,
The glaciers retreated, scouring the land mass below.
Soon after, plants spirits woke, yawned, and stretched,
Gazing at the landscape the ice age had etched.
A young birch tree spirit – who was the tallest
Suddenly jumped with panic and unrest:
“Oh no, oh dear!” he cried “sound the alarm!”
And pointed in the distance, with his thin woody arm.
“Calm down!” said a shrub spirit “what’s the problem?”
“The dragons!” cried the birch “can you not see them?”
So, they all looked around and they saw with horror
Dragons, everywhere… in a very deep slumber.
“I know what to do” a small voice whispered quietly.
It came from a bog moss, small, crimson red and dainty:
“We’ll knit a blanket…” she began – but they laughed and said “fool!”
“A special blanket” she said more firmly “that keeps dragons cool”.
“It’ll need to be big, for all the dragons to fit”
“So let’s start!” she went on and taught them how to knit.
And thus, all the plants spirits sat down and knitted,
They knitted and knitted and knitted and knitted.
For thousands of years, they knitted tirelessly,
And the blanket grew, from the mountains to the sea.
The blanket grew wide, and the blanket grew deep
It rose up and fell down as dragons breathed in their sleep.
Until one day, humans arrived in Scotland
To build homes, to hunt food and set claims on the land.
They poked the blanket, making holes here and there,
And the plant spirits sensed a change in the air.
They gathered a council to review the situation
And discussed and agreed on a course of action.
“See how the rips are mostly on the edge”
Argued a golden and slender-looking sedge,
“They won’t wake the dragons, I am pretty sure”
“They are tiny cuts, the blanket is secure.”
“That’s right” said the shrub “and can we not mend it?”
“I suggest that we all just continue to knit”
So the plant spirits knitted and knitted some more,
But while they knitted, they couldn’t ignore
That for reasons they just couldn’t get
Humans continued to ruin their special blanket.
The holes kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger
“Look” the birch screamed “this human brought a digger!”
And the plant spirits all looked on with despair
As the dozers and diggers cut out drains everywhere
Then humans brought flocks of very hungry sheep
Who grazed near the gashes, so long and so deep.
They planted foreign trees around large ditches
And stretched and broke down the blanket’s tight stitches
“ Enough!” the bog moss shouted “something must be done”
“Or before we know it, the blanket will be gone!”
“But who can we tell, will those humans listen?”
“Maybe not them…” mused the sedge, “but maybe their children?”
And so the plant spirits overcame their fears
To whisper like the wind in the children’s small ears
“Look closely at this blanket, isn’t it sublime?”
“We have all knitted it for such a long time…”
“See all the life that depends on this blanket”
“The rivers that it feeds, the birds that live on it…”
“Look at all these colours, how they change in the light?”
And the children saw it all with a new-found delight
They tried to describe this beauty to others
And managed to protect some of the blanket’s corners
But the damage was profound, the blanket was shrinking
And the dragons, deep down, soon started stirring.
“I’m worried” the birch tree said to all the plant spirits,
“The blanket is so broken, it’s fallen into bits”
“The dragon’s breaths have become erratic”
“If they wake up, it will be… dramatic!”
“We must tell the truth…” the wise bog moss spoke
“Or the world that we know may well go up in smoke!”
“We must warn the children of the real dragons’ threat”
“We must teach them to knit, and to mend the blanket”
It was their last chance – the plant spirits knew it well
So they summoned their powers in a magical spell
As the children slept, they started to have visions,
Of the broken blanket bursting out with dragons,
In that way, the dreams truly began to reveal
Just why the blanket was a really big deal
The dragons were scary, but there was hope too
As the dreams also showed the children what to do
The children spoke to everyone and told them the story
They warned of dragons and of the plant spirits worry
That if the special blanket was not looked after fast
Then even the human were not guaranteed to last.
Now, humans block drains, cut trees and patch up cracks
And the plant spirits are able to follow in their tracks
They join forces and work as one team
Stitching back the blanket with a yarn made of dream.
And what of the dragons, you may be wondering
Under the blanket, it looks like they are snoring
And I hope they will continue to snore
For another ten thousand years, or perhaps even more…
Janis MacKay: Author
The Bog-Girl of The Flow Country
There was once a Bog Girl. Her dress was peat-black fringed with soft green moss. In her dark hair she wore tiny flowers of white bog cotton and pink bog-bean, and her long necklace was made from dark green Bog-firs. But she was lonely, this Bog-Girl, and often gazed at her reflection in dark pools for company. The Bog Girl looked after the wilderness of the Flow Country, caring for its marvel of deep peat Blanket Bog that covered the ancient and vast sunken forest. The Bog Girl sang with the wind to help the people of Scotland breathe good clean air. She sang songs to encourage the insects, the birds, the running deer, and she sang to remember the Bog People, now gone, but not forgotten, for she, The Bog Girl, remembered them. Some called the Bog Girl the spirit of the wind. Others called her the guardian of the great bog. Though few have ever seen her.
Marta closed her little story book and put it by her bed. She knew the story of the mysterious Bog Girl off by heart. No matter how many times she heard, or read the story, she wept. Imagine being so lonely that you stared at your reflection for company.
‘Well, it’s a wet and lonely place,’ Marta’s mother said, when Marta asked what the Flow Country was like. ‘Twice the size of Orkney and some say, almost otherworldly.’
That summer they were going to Orkney on holiday, because Marta’s mum liked standing stones, and in Orkney, she told her daughter, there were lots of them.
Journeying the long road north; Marta, her mother and their collie dog Floss, Marta’s mum talked excitedly about a circle of standing stones she planned to visit, called the Ring of Brodgar. Marta thought about the Bog Girl. The dog, curled up next to her, was mostly asleep. Marta peered from the window as the road swept over the river Ord where a large road sign welcomed them to the county of CAITHNESS! ‘Berriedale Braes,’ Marta’s mum announced a few moments later. She proceeded to drive the car down a steep curved road by the edge of the sea. ‘Hold onto your hat!’ she warned her daughter. Then, in first gear, she slowly drove up a very steep twisting road. ‘We made it!’ Marta’s mum said, sounding relieved, when Berriedale Braes were safely behind them. Now the land was flat. The road followed the edge of the land where cliffs plunged steeply and then the sea stretched for miles. Marta gazed out of the car window; the vast sea on one side, and the flat and mostly treeless landscape on the other. All the way she thought wistfully about the Bog Girl.
Marta was jolted from her reverie by the squeal of the car suddenly braking. In front of them a sheep was slowly crossing the road, as if it had all the time in the world. Floss perked up and started barking. It was then that Marta saw the signpost at the roadside– the Flow Country 8 miles, it said, with an arrow pointing inland.
Marta’s heart skipped a beat. ‘Oh, please,’ she cried, ‘can we go. Look! We’re so close to the Bog Girl’s home. Oh please.’
‘But it’s just a story,’ her mum said, ‘and we have a ferry to catch.’
‘But I have to go, please,’ Marta begged. Her heart was racing now. For years the Bog Girl had been her favourite story. She had dreamt of the Bog Girl, drawn pictures of her. And now, unbelievably, they were near the Flow Country. The Bog Girl’s home was just eight miles away!
Marta’s mum checked the time. ‘Just a flying visit then,’ she said, glancing back at her bright-eyed daughter and excited dog. ‘And Floss could do with a run.’ So she turned the car off the main road and followed the sign for the Flow Country.
Marta blinked, and pinched herself. Was she dreaming? The dog was peering out of the car window, tail wagging as they drove along the narrow road.
Welcome to the Forsinard, Flow Country, announced a large sign. They pulled into the small car park. They were the only car. Marta peered out at the vast stretch of boggy land patterned with so many silvery twisting rivers and dark lochans dotted here and there. ‘I did warn you it was a lonely spot,’ Marta’s mum said, hopping from the car and setting the dog free. Marta scrambled after them. Her mum was already striding down the narrow path that wove between small pools. Marta followed, gazing all about her in wonder. To her this place was beautiful. So quiet. No people. No cars. No roads. Just a vast swirling landscape of colours, black, green, pink, blue. No wonder it was called a blanket. Under foot the earth was spongy, like stepping over cushions. She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the pure air. She gazed up. The wide sky seemed to go on for miles. She looked down, seeing a small wonder of red and pink moss by her feet, and next to the sphagnum moss she saw pale green lichen curling like lace. The closer she looked, the more she saw, and she loved it. ‘Hello, Bog Girl,’ she murmured, ‘I’ve come to visit you.’
‘Remember,’ her mum called back to her, ‘we don’t have long, just stretch your legs then we need to get going.’
Marta wished this was their holiday destination – the Flow Country. The very name was like a spell. And it didn’t feel lonely to her. White wispy flowers of bog cotton swayed in the wind. A dragonfly landed on a small pink flower then hopped onto a purple petal of bell heather. The breeze rippled the water in the many little pools and seemed to whisper her name – Marta…..Marta….
The dog barked then bounded off. Marta’s mum, shouting for Floss, ran after him. And so, for a few precious minutes Marta was alone in the Flow Country. The barking noise faded. The calls of her mother too. Everything that belonged to normal life vanished and Marta stood gazing at the vast stretch of dark and deep peat bogs, the heather, the bog myrtle and tufted clumps of grass. She looked down into one of the small pools and saw her own wobbly face mirrored there. She plucked a stalk of white bog cotton and tucked it behind her ear. It felt to her such a peaceful, almost magical place. ‘You don’t have to be alone, Bog Girl,’ Marta called out, ‘I am here.’
The sighing wind ruffled Marta’s hair. A golden eagle circled in the clear air high above. A black throated diver slipped silently into a pool. A golden plover stood to attention on a tussocky hummock nearby. Marta drank it all it, then stared down at her feet, standing on the dark peaty earth. She thought in wonder how it takes, as her school teacher had informed her, twelve thousand years for peat to develop. And there it was, right there, ancient and helping her breathe, under her feet. Perhaps it was the softness of the boggy ground but it seemed to Marta that the earth beneath her trembled. Marta gasped, then smiled in delight, as she saw, from the bog, a dark small shadow rise and sway in front of her. ‘Hello, Bog Girl,’ Marta said, for now the shadow seemed to grow fuller. So full that now Marta could see the little black dress fringed with moss. She could see tiny white and pink flowers in the Bog Girl’s black hair. She could see her eyes, dark as pools, in her elfin face.
For a wondrous moment the two gazed at each other. It may only have been a moment, but for Marta time stood still, and in that timeless moment she felt the spirit of the wind breathe through her.
Marta became aware of her mother calling. The Bog Girl bent and scooped something up from the blanket bog then pressed it into Marta’s outstretched palm. It was a small, quartz crystal, mottled with tinges of pink, green and white. ‘Remember me,’ she sang, ‘breathe freely, and remember to care for the wild places, for they matter much.’ She gestured to the ridges, slopes and spongy dips of her precious landscape.
‘I know,’ Marta said, nodding, for somehow she understood that this place – the Flow Country – did matter, very much indeed. And as she nodded, and smiled, holding the precious gift in her hands, the Bog Girl became shadow once more, and the peaty earth beneath Marta’s feet trembled.
Marta’s mother was berating the dog and leading it towards the car, calling over to her daughter, saying they needed to leave, now!
Marta clutched the crystal, afraid it might disappear. But it was real, just as the Bog Girl was real, just as her words were real. Marta repeated them in her head, over and over, as she clambered back into the car. Remember me…breathe freely…and remember to care for the wild places…for they matter much….
All too soon the Flow Country and its quiet magic was behind them. Marta stared out of the back window as they drove away, and she waved.
‘We don’t want to miss that ferry,’ her mum was saying.
The Bog Girl stood on a tuft of peaty blanket bog and watched Marta go. She lifted a small hand, and waved back.
The wind ruffled the water in the lochans. The Bog Girl glanced down into the dark water, and this time it was not only her own reflection that gazed back at her.
The end
Ruth Thomas: Author
Above The Plain
The Flow Country – at least, the bit she can see from the station – is not as lunar as she’d imagined. She’d wondered, disembarking from the train, if she might feel like Neil Armstrong climbing down his little ladder to the surface of the moon – but actually the landscape is not completely barren or devoid of human life. There’s even a postbox and a couple of roads and, on the other side of the tracks, a house. Lucy wonders who lives in the house; whether, in the event of dire need or train cancellations (there being only one train back down the track for the rest of that day), she could knock on the front door, seeking refuge.
She has arranged to meet a moss expert– technical term, bryologist – whose name, funnily enough, is Dr Fern. In a Zoom meeting the previous week, Dr Fern (first name Kenneth) had told her that over thirty-five species of moss grow in the peat bogs there. ‘The whole of this part of the Highlands,’ he’d continued, screen-sharing a map called Flow Country: kilometrical extent, ‘is pretty much what you would call bog.’ Which is, of course, why so many moss species grow there: it is one of the most significant areas for moss in the entire world. And also why the Flow Country is basically the finest place on the planet for capturing carbon. Because the moss and other plants that live there don’t decompose, as such, meaning they don’t release their carbon.
Not a lot of people know that, he’d added. ‘Did you know that?’
‘Well no,’ Lucy said.
‘It’s also why we want to avoid damaging the blanket bog, at all costs’
‘Yes,’ Lucy agreed – suddenly realising how much she didn’t, in fact, know about mosses and carbon capture. She’d hardly even known the term blanket bog before talking to Kenneth.
‘And not only that! We even have our very own carnivorous plant species!’ he added – on a lighter note, she presumed. ‘It’s called a Sundew. You’ll find it growing around the sphagnums’
‘Wow. Right…’
‘Look,’ he’d added, ‘here’s one,’ and he’d shown her a picture of a Sundew – a quite pretty, pale green thing, fringed with short, coral pink spikes. It looked delicate, exotic; more the kind of plant you’d expect to see on a tropical island. Or maybe under the sea.
‘So what do… Sundews eat?’ Lucy asked – having only ever heard the name applied before to a type of melon you might find in Sainsbury’s, say, or Morrisons.
‘They eat insects,’ Kenneth said. ‘It’s OK, they don’t eat journalists from London!’ And he began to laugh.
‘Right’ she said again, wondering if he’d ever given a presentation entitled ‘How to encourage urban hacks to the remote Scottish Highlands’. She suspected he might not have done. The name sundew (she thought, but didn’t say) also sounded quite endearing for a carnivorous plant. But she didn’t think Kenneth would necessarily agree with this idea: she had a sense that their take on things might diverge quite a lot. I’m mainly going for the birdlife, anyway, she wanted to say. For the cuckoos and the plovers and the larks. And alighting from the train at Forsinard station, she’d discovered there was in fact an RSPB centre right there, on the platform – un-staffed, but containing information leaflets and postcards and a hot drinks machine and a short film about the Flow Country. Presumably, she thinks now, a centre like that is not there for nothing.
The publication she works for – thrillingly named Wild Life – is mainly, in fact, a glorified lifestyle magazine. One whole section in the last issue had been completely devoted to sustainable garden furniture. For the latest edition, she and two of her fellow freelancers had been asked to cover three different, environmentally important parts of Europe, the resulting write-ups to be published in the autumn edition, and the three parts of Europe being the Scottish Highlands, Andalucia and Sicily.
Lucy’s colleagues, Hannah and Joe, had got Andalucia and Sicily respectively, while Lucy had got the peat bogs of Caithness.
Hannah and Joe had both found this quite amusing. They’d both laughed, for quite a long time – ‘with you, Luce, not at you!’ as Hannah had reassured her, even though Lucy couldn’t help feeling that ‘at’ might be in there somewhere. They’d also both remarked on May being the perfect month during which to visit Andalucia and Sicily because they could both take in, while there, the balmy but not over-hot weather, the beaches, the warm, healing seas, the various cultural delights, the local cuisines, the gorgeous wines.
‘Are there likely to be midges in Caithness in May?’ Lucy had asked Kenneth the previous week, during their Zoom chat: she’d suddenly felt the need to ask practical questions like this. And Kenneth had looked quite serious for a moment. Then he’d said
‘It would be advisable to bring midge repellent, yes. Also,’ he’d added, ‘you’ll need to beware of picking up ticks from the deer’
‘Ticks…’ she said, writing this down. She looked up. ‘Anything else to… be aware of?’
‘Yes: stick to the boardwalks,’ Kenneth said.
————
Planning her journey the previous week, she’d considered driving nearly all the way up the British mainland, from central London to Caithness, but having discovered this was a journey of over six hundred miles which would take at least twelve hours, she’d decided on the train instead – a journey involving four changes, at King’s Cross, Edinburgh, Perth and Inverness, and which had, itself, taken almost eleven hours. She could have flown to Wick Airport, she supposed, as she’d sat looking out of the train window, but this would hardly have been in keeping with her environmental brief.
Hannah and Joe had both flown, of course, to Andalucia and Sicily. Given the copy date (as they’d both pointed out during an editorial meeting a couple of weeks ago), there would simply not have been time to take ferries all the way there and back. ‘Can’t you file your copy from the boat?’ Lucy had asked, but no-one had seemed to hear this.
‘Well – have fun in Sicily!’ she’d added to Joe as they were heading out a little later.
‘Thanks. I will.’ He’d paused. ‘I think you probably drew the short straw,’ he’d added. ‘Wading around the bogs, while Hannah and I are in the Med…’
‘On the contrary. I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ she’d replied, robustly.
‘Have you got any particular… species you’re hoping to see? I’m very much hoping to spot an Aeolian wall lizard,’ Joe had added – the Aeolian wall lizard, he’d discovered, while conducting a little light Google research, was on the Red List of critically endangered European reptile species: it was very much the canary in the coal mine, he said, as far as biodiversity in Sicily was concerned.
‘Yeah, well, good luck with that!’ Lucy said. ‘Seeing as the Aeolian wall lizard is so incredibly rare. And you’re only there forty-eight hours. I mean, I’ve probably got as much chance spotting a lizard in Caithness!’
‘Ah, but Luce,’ he replied, sadly, ‘lizards like warmth and dry conditions! They like sunning themselves on walls! I’m not convinced a Scottish bog is entirely their natural habitat!’
Which – she had to concede – was probably true. But can the Aeolian islands capture nearly thirty per cent of the world’s land carbon, Joe? she wanted to say. Can they store 400 millions tonnes of carbon, like the Flow Country can? Because this was also true: during the little presentation Kenneth Fern had given her, he’d explained what an incredibly important role the Flow Country had to play not only locally but on the world-stage – how the bogs that existed in that particular bit of the world acted as a massive ‘carbon sink.’ The far northern Highlands were basically, he said, the crème de la crème of carbon capture. But then, what did she truly know about environmental matters? She’d grown up in the countryside but had spent the past eight years of her life working as a journalist in Croydon.
‘Anyway,’ Joe had concluded. ‘Just make sure you don’t fall in any peat bogs, Luce.’
‘I’ll try not to’
‘And it’s not supposed to be a competition, is it,’ he’d added. ‘About who’s got the coolest wildlife to write about. Or who’s bagged the best bit of Europe. Even though I am heading off to Sicily,’ he’d concluded. ‘And there are going to be chameleons’
Then he’d headed off, to catch his flight.
On the train up from London, somewhere between Newcastle and Edinburgh, she had found herself thinking again about Joe and his Aeolian wall lizard – and she’d also thought for a while about her late grandfather, who had always been something of an amateur expert on wildlife and the natural world. He’d really seemed to know what he was talking about as far as nature was concerned, and in the year since his death she’d often wished he’d known about her new job at Wild Life – which at least purported to be about nature, even if it was often more about sustainable bamboo furniture. Her grandfather’s own garden in Nottinghamshire had had a fruit-cage as well as flowerbeds, a herb garden, a compost heap, a woodshed and a little pond, full of tadpoles in the spring and baby frogs in the summer. For years, he’d also used to have a couple of bags of Irish peat propped up against the side of the woodshed. Lucy remembered that, suddenly – with a little burst of recollection: how the words Finest Irish Sphagnum Peat Moss had always been printed on the side of the bags, alongside an image of a bright green shamrock, and how, as a young child, she’d wondered what sphagnum was, and whether (because of the letters it contained) it had anything to do with spaghetti. She also remembered that one summer there’d suddenly been no bags of Irish peat propped up by the woodshed, and that in their place were bags of something called peat-free compost. ‘Why aren’t you using the Irish peat any more? The one with the shamrock on the bag?’ she’d asked him. This would have been in the late nineties: she would have been nine or ten.
‘Because digging peat up is very bad for the environment,’ he’d told her.
And really, right up to that week, when she’d listened to Kenneth Fern giving his Flow Country presentation, she’d never properly considered why. She hadn’t really given any thought to peat and mosses and carbon capture. She wished she could talk to her grandfather about it now, and tell him what she’d learned.
And now here she is, waiting for Kenneth Fern at Forsinard station. For the briefest moment, as she stands there on the platform, she experiences a terrible sense of abandonment; almost an existential panic. Because it might not be entirely lunar, but it really is very remote, still; a really very long way from Croydon. It might as well be Iceland. But then, after a short while she hears the sound of a vehicle in the distance, and she turns to see a dark green Landrover thundering along the road, its wheels picking up the early summer dust, like something in a Western, before it pulls up sharp in a layby beside the house. Then Kenneth Fern gets out.
‘Lucy,’ he says, heading towards her, his hand outstretched.
‘Hi,’ she says, smiling. Like everyone these days, he is an approximation of the person she’d spoken to on Zoom. In real life, he is taller and slightly older looking, with more of a beard.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he says. ‘I was dropping the kids off at school’
School? Where could a school possibly be, around here? she thinks. We are literally miles from anywhere.
‘They go to school in Helmsdale,’ he says, as if he has read her mind. ‘It’s about twelve miles away’
‘Ah…’
‘You have to pretty much go everywhere by car around here, I’m afraid’
‘Yes…’
‘And you’ve traveled a long way, I take it?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘All the way from Croydon.’ She pauses. ‘But I stayed the night in Inverness.’
‘Well, it would have been an achievement to get here from Croydon in a day!’ Kenneth says. ‘Or, at least a challenge to the time-space continuum’
‘Yes…’ She is suddenly aware how odd it is, to finally be there, in a tiny hamlet in Caithness, with a stranger called Kenneth: to have come all this way, for this purpose.
‘So: great you could be here, anyway. Do you want to grab a quick coffee first,’ he asks, ‘before we head along the boardwalk?’
‘A coffee?’ she asks, looking around, as if a Costa might suddenly materialize in front of her.
‘From the coffee machine in the station’
‘Oh…’
‘Or shall we just head along to the lookout tower, while it’s not raining…’ he adds, looking up into the sky.
She looks up too. It doeslook as if it might rain. It does look as if it might not be quite the beautifully sunny day Hannah and Joe will be experiencing in the Mediterranean. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘let’s head along the boardwalk first, to the look-out tower. What’s it for, exactly?’ she adds, ‘the look-out tower?’
‘Well, it’s to look out from’
‘Yes. Of course…’
And they set off, heading over the level crossing and a short distance along the road, before turning abruptly right, onto the boglands proper. It is clearly not going to be a particularly long or arduous walk to the look-out tower: she’d imagined leaping and springing across soggy terrain, but the boardwalk begins almost as soon as the road ends, and the boards are weathered and wide beneath her brand new walking boots. She is reminded very slightly of the only other work trip she has undertaken so far, for Wild Life – a joint assignment to Florida with Joe and Hannah the previous year, to cover the Everglades, where they’d walked along a boardwalk called John’s Pass, reputed to have been created by a pirate named John Levique in eighteen-hundred-and-something. In most other respects, though, this boardwalk in the Flow Country, and this landscape, are nothing like John’s Pass or Florida at all. Just as they are nothing like Sicily, or Andalucia.
‘So, my colleagues have lucked out, in a sense…’ she says after a moment, plodding along behind Kenneth, ‘because they got to go to Southern Europe.’
‘Lucked out in what way?’ Kenneth asks, over his shoulder.
‘Well, I mean, it’s lovely here…’ she continues, politely, looking around her at the vista – the virtually silent, brownish plains beneath the wide, pale sky – ‘but they did – you know – get the sunshine…’ she adds, feeling a little melancholy suddenly – at a kind of loss – ‘and maybe they have a bit more… diversity of wildlife to write about, and… variety of terrain…’
She hardly knows what she is talking about. She is mainly talking to make herself feel better about her lot. And Kenneth doesn’t reply anyway: he has suddenly, in fact, stopped dead in his tracks, causing her almost to walk straight into him, and he is pointing at something on the planks of the boardwalk; some little creature. ‘Ssh!’ he’s saying, ‘look!’
And she looks, and sees that there is a lizard: there is a tiny, greyish-green lizard, just sitting there on the wooden board, in a sudden burst of sunlight. She has only been there in the Flow Country about five minutes – they haven’t even made it to the lookout tower yet – but she has already seen this: a lizard. She could easily have missed it because it really is very tiny. Its size and shape reminds her of the little plastic dinosaurs she used to place around the pond in her grandfather’s garden when she was small, imagining a tiny Jurassic world.
‘Zootaca vivipara,’ Kenneth whispers, crouching to look more closely at it. ‘Or, common lizard’
‘But – not that common…?’ Lucy whispers back.
‘Not if we don’t protect where it lives,’ he says, as, sensing their presence, it suddenly darts away beneath the boardwalk.
Lucy doesn’t speak for a moment. Then she says
‘It’s funny, because I remember my granddad buying these great bags of peat once, for his garden. Of sphagnum moss peat. Then one year he suddenly just stopped. And when I asked him why, he said it was to protect the environment. Only it never really occurred to me before, quite what he was talking about. I mean, what kind of environment’
Kenneth stands up again. ‘Well, he’s obviously a wise man, your granddad,’ he says.
‘He was,’ she says. She breathes in. ‘One of my colleagues,’ she adds after a moment, ‘the one who’s gone to Sicily – is on the look-out for an Aeolian wall lizard this week.’
‘Really?’ Kenneth says. ‘An Aeolian wall lizard. Well. Good luck with that!’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘He didn’t think I’d spot a lizard here. He didn’t think they’d even exist in this kind of climate’
‘Ah well, it’s a surprising place, the Flow Country,’ Kenneth says. ‘There’s an awful lot more to it than meets the eye. It’s ten meters deep, for a start. And not far off the size of the Great Barrier Reef. I mean, it’s pretty vast’
‘Yes – so I see…’ she says, looking around – because she feels she does see; or is beginning to. The scale, at least – of the problem, and the solution. She sees some of what her grandfather was talking about. And she and Kenneth stop talking and carry on for a while, walking the turns and curves of the boardwalk, past the pools of mosses and sundews, and over to the look-out tower. They climb the steps and look out at the drifts of cotton-grass covering the earth like snow, and down at the pools of standing water, and across at a little herd of deer running along the horizon, and up still further, into the sky, at a bird of prey – a hen harrier, Kenneth says –– ‘now, that is rare…’, he adds, watching as it soars silently, circling the currents like a blessing or a harbinger, high above the plain.
