Bog Woman || Heartwork || Announcing our Summer Tours
“The ground itself is kind, black butter / Melting and opening underfoot”
-Seamus Heaney
For reasons I will never understand, when I was a child, my aunt Laurie started calling me “Katie from the Bog.” Back then, to say someone was from the bog was often meant to be derogatory. It meant someone from rural Ireland--and not in a nice way. Needless to say, she was an odd woman, and her plan backfired. I loved the nickname, and it’s only recently that I started to think about why.
One answer to this question comes from Rebecca Solnit in A Book of Migrations, a collection of essays she penned following her travels through Ireland to explore the homeland of her maternal ancestors. “We are often in two places at once,” she writes, musing on the impact of migration, travel, and geography can have on memory, imagination, and identity. It’s a feeling I can relate to; raised by an Irish immigrant father, Ireland was always a presence in the room.
A few weeks ago Max and I were on a tour of Cnoc Suain with Claire Davey, a local herbalist and spiritual practitioner as well as our partner on Bog & Thunder’s Lughnasa tour. Cnoc Suian is a magical place, and in addition to being an Irish language center is also a repository of folklore and knowledge--especially around bogs. Charlie Troy, the proprietor, took us out onto the blanket bog, a freshwater wetland made primarily of decayed plant matter called peat. There he handed us a shovel and showed us how to dig for peat in the bog. “So you’re a bog woman,” he said as I picked it up and explained my father was from Tullamore. I was surprised to find myself so chuffed. Me, a bog woman. In the moment, that acknowledgement from Charlie of my identity made me feel at home. I felt like I’d finally lived up to my weird aunt Laurie’s claim about me, but in a positive way.
Charlie Troy shows us some sphagnum moss from the blanket bog at Cnoc Suain.
Most people just think of a swamp when they hear the word “bog.” I’ve even heard the word bog used as a slang for the bathroom or a toilet, the term “bog roll” to refer to toilet paper. And I suppose it makes sense, on the surface, to imagine a bog as a wasteland, as an expanse of ground far too wet for many things to grow. Even the rich, deep mahogany color of peat looks like shit.
But bogs are not, in fact, wastelands or toilets or homelands to be ashamed of--they are truly wondrous places that play an essential role in the ecosystem. Traditionally seen as wasteland, peatlands have for many years in Ireland been drained and used for agriculture. Irish people have also used peat as fuel for heat and cooking going back more than a thousand years. You can still smell the sharp sweetness of burning peat in the air all over the country. It quickly becomes familiar and comforting, and for those of us who spend a lot of time there, it smells like home. If you’re a fan of traditionally made peated whisky (better known as scotch), it’s the smokiness on the nose and the palette.
And the value of bogs is becoming even more recognized today in the age of climate change. Bogs are one of most efficient carbon sinks on the planet; globally they hold at least twice as much carbon as forests. Bogs can take hundreds or thousands of years to develop, a fact which makes preserving the few we have left essential.
According to Margaret Hickey, author of Ireland’s Green Larder: The Definitive History of Irish Food and Drink, Irish people would use a bog like a refrigerator, to keep goods like butter cool and safe from predators--a practice that extended to other parts of northern Europe; people in warmer climates like India and Morocco also buried butter to preserve it. Hickey also suggests that the practice could have its origins in ritual. She writes:
In a pre-Christian Celtic world that was notably harsh and unpredictable, attempts had to be made to appease malevolent supernatural powers. Burying what you considered precious was an offering that, it was hoped, would be accepted and could placate those powers. By appeasing the spirits with a gift of buried butter people could buy, for a time, the health of cattle and a good supply of milk for the making of butter.
For Max and I, Bog & Thunder is very much what the beloved Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue would call heartful work, borne out of our love of food, community, and justice. We believe that every act we take is an ecological act, and so our business decisions are guided with this intention.
O’Donohue explains how heartful work brings beauty in his book, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom:
When you consider it, the world of your action and activity is a very precious world. What you do should be worthy of you; it should be worthy of your attention and dignity, and conform to your respect for yourself. If you can love what you do, then you will do it beautifully. You might not love your work at the beginning; yet the deeper side of your soul can help you bring the light of love to what you do. Then, regardless of what you do, you will do it in a creative and transforming way.
Heartwork is perhaps the perfect way to describe how Charlie and his wife Dearbhaill Standún, a traditional musician, have nurtured Cnoc Suain--whose name means restful hill--into the transformative center for connection, creativity, and culture that it is today. We look forward to celebrating the Celtic festival of Lughnasa with feast, fire, and ceremony at Cnoc Suain at the close of our Lughnasa tour in 2022.
I’m delighted to announce that the full slate of our 2022 tours are available on our new website.
What We’re Reading:
Kate: I can’t get enough of literary nonfiction about anything even tangentially related to fish, rivers, and coastal communities, and right now I’m reading The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel by David Gange. The author chronicles his journey via kayak around the Atlantic coasts of Britain and Ireland over the course of the year. If you enjoyed Weymouth’s Kings of the Yukon, you might like this.
I’ve also recently started The Seed Keepers by Diane Wilson, and I can’t put it down. It’s an intergenerational story about a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life. Beautifully written.
Max: I just finished The Doors of Eden, a sci fi book by Adrian Tchaikovsky, a wonderful story about beings from different timelines and dimensions trying to find a way to live together.
What We’re Listening To:
Kate: I’m loving the recently released John Prine tribute album, Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine, Vol. 2, as well as Georgia Blue, a charity cover album produced by Jason Isbell, with proceeds benefiting Black Voters Matter, Fair Fight, and Georgia STAND-UP.
Max: The new album by Béla Fleck, My Bluegrass Heart, is really incredible.
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