Seasons and Colours

“And I’ve always loved the bog, and spending a lot of time in the hills. And I love the bog any time of the year. In the springtime, when all the bog-cottons come up in the little pools and the flowers … it’s a wonderful time. Summertime is perhaps the only time I don’t really like the bog because of the midges, but the autumn, at this time of the year, it’s wonderful. The colours are just so brilliant. And in the wintertime they’re great when it’s frozen and you can actually walk in places where you can’t … and the wee pools are frozen over with ice. So, I’ve spent quite a lot of time in the bog! […] I just love the bog. The smell of it. And the bog-myrtle, you can see, I’ve always got bog-myrtle standing in our house.”

“I like the bogs for all their wild flowers which we used to gather. Lots of different things growing there and they look lovely. What I don’t like about them is walking through them! We were always frightened that we would go down in a bog and never get out of it. I suppose it’s what our parents used to say. But I’m proud of them and that they are part of our heritage.”

Sun and Showers

“Well the one thing about the Flow is; it’s quite a foreboding, desolate place. As I say, it’s not populated, it’s sparse, it’s low vegetation cover – there is very little trees. You are looking at brown, extensive moorland with this water. So I think anyone – and I remember this feeling of really feeling quite small at the Flow country, when I first saw it. It was this very expansive, expansive area.

I think it’s interesting though, because drawing, for example, on recent experiences of being in the Flow. For example today – it’s very changeable. So there are times when you think it’s the most desolate, miserable, bleakest place. But it’s also quite homogenous in terms of vegetation. But there are other times when you see it in a different light when you realise that it’s very rich and diverse – the bio-diversity is actually much higher than you might first think when you first look but it’s also – probably related to the weather –it’s also a really beautiful place and it can be quite enchanting. But that’s quite weather dependent. And I think it really changes. For example, when I was out today it changed from being very intense, cold, showery weather to being very bright and sunny. I was walking out to a clearance village – BadanLoisgin, which lies south of Rimsdale on the road between Syre and Kinbrace and I was walking out there and the weather was atrocious, very, very boggy, very wet and I was negotiating my way across the moorlands and going to this village and I thought – this has to be the most hardest environment for people to live. And the most bleak and desolate.

But then when the sun came out I could see actually it was a lot more beautiful – you had views over to Ben Loyal towards the east and perhaps – sorry, to the west I mean, Ben Loyal to the west and to the east you’ve got Ben Griam Mòr and Ben Griam Beag and it can be quite a dramatic landscape, perhaps not as fearsome as I might of thought five minutes earlier when the rain was pouring down.

And did you see beauty in the actual Flow itself as well as the landscape?

Absolutely, although as I say I don’t think that’s really Flow country I was in, for example, today. But there is beauty in the heather – and I’m not a botanist or anything – but the different heather types, in the bog cotton, in some of the flowers that I saw today, for example. You have to look a bit closely. I think there is also beauty just in the general landscape and to me it’s a historic landscape. I think it’s quite easy to think of the Flow country, as I say , as being desolate and empty but it really is largely a working landscape. It’s certainly home to stalking, you’ve got the forestry and forestation, certainly around some of it. And as I say, Badinloishgin, for example, which really is situated in bog land – there was a living community in the midst of this boggy moorland. So historically it’s been very much an occupied territory and I think it still probably is quite active, there is quite active use of it in terms of stalking and in terms of fishing. People like me going to walk and look at historic sites, the forestry, and presumably in bird watchers. Because one thing I saw today was the huge variety of bird life in the bog lands.”