The peatland landscape is one of danger underfoot; shifting land that looks reliable until you sink up to your knee. Tricked.
It’s a perilous place for people to traverse and, perhaps because of this, became the muddy home of bogles and stories of warning to be told around a peat fire in old times.

Here’s one such story. A long, long time ago, a woman was hurrying over the bog. She was late returning home and had decided to take a shortcut. The dwindling light made a ghost of her, and her silhouette lowped from tussock to tussock. Suddenly, her eye was caught by a lantern – or what looked like a lantern. Its green light was, to her, a beacon – perhaps someone coming to guide her home. She ran towards it – and was never seen again.
Folk say she was lured off the path by the Will-o'-the-Wisp. They say restless spirits roam the peatland, looking to draw the unwitting away from the path.
And what of the tale of the Kelpie, water-deevil, shape-shifting water-horse? Some call the Loch Ness Monster a Kelpie, but they can live in the sucking, pooling water of bogs too, grabbing walkers and dragging them down to be devoured. They’ll often take human form, but here’s some advice: if you’re not sure, look down, as they aren’t able to rid themselves of their hooves. And best stay back a safe distance from the water.

^{Image: a fogbow over peatland: formed by sunlight interacting with tiny water droplets in fog, or perhaps created by a ghost...}

These tales are from a long time ago, and the peatland has changed so much since. In some areas, the land was drained and the peat dried up and put to more practical human use. On Bile Buidhe, now RSPB Abernethy land, deer were historically present in much higher numbers as well as cattle and sheep grazing here. There’s still a horror to the landscape, but now of a different kind.

Our peatlands are scarred. Over years and years - peat erosion is thought to occur at a rate of up to 1cm per year - the erosive forces of water, wind, ice and snow have worked into the cracks in the peat surface created by the trampling of deer and sheep. Their unnaturally high numbers were enough to expose the dark carbon rich peat under its protective blanket of vegetation.

Today, peatlands are covered in extensive ripped gashes, like a gigantic bogle has torn its sharp fingers over and over the land. Peat hags are over two metres high, and you can walk through time in the gully bottoms, with protruding skeletons of pine and birch revealing past life. The land holds memory. These memories are meant for waterlogged ground so the decomposing fibres of bog vegetation can continue to lock away carbon. Instead, this once locked up carbon is being stripped from the land, into the air and water adding to the biggest monster of all – climate change. We mustn’t forget the importance of keeping the carbon and the lands memory safely held in the earth.

^{Images: a yellow excavator looms, dramatically backed by mountains (left); a coir log snakes in the foreground of re-wetted land, with coir netting bandaging the slopes behind}

The story isn’t finished yet; the landscape is home to new beasts now, ones who can help. The ground has been meshed with a spider’s web of coir, bandaging the peat and protecting it from the elements. Under these webs, the intricate shoots of sphagnum, other mosses and heather can quietly grow and begin to revegetate these troubled lands.

Excavators loom out in the distance, in and out of the mist that hangs over the seemingly unending peatland. Their extendable claws manipulate the peat, removing the hags and re-profiling them to support revegetation. They make peat dams in the gullies, allowing water to pool which begins to restore the hydrology of the landscape.

When we are granted a clear day, we are revealed as small figures within an expansive landscape. Beyond the restoration site, the land curves away, and across the burn degraded peatlands cover the hills. Further still stand the mountains of the northern plateau, Cairngorm and the rocky spine of Bynack More. After heavy rains, ghostly silver threads run down the mountains of Ben A’an that line the eastern horizon.

^{Images: vibrant green mosses and grass growing in an area of pooled water (left); carnivorous bright red sundews (right) Photos: Megan Jones}

Soon the new beasts will trundle off and disappear from this landscape and leave sphagnum and bog cotton to grow out and up and through, fully covering the coir netting. More life will then be able to take root. Carnivorous Sundew plants will nestle into the vegetation, raising questing tendrils towards the gloomy sky and insects brought by the new water and vegetation.
The growing peatland habitat will be left to the wind and rain.

Until you decide to pull on your boots and head out for a walk. It’s late October, and you’re all wrapped up in wool and waterproof. With a smile, you mind your granny’s warning to stick to the path. A fog hangs over the brown hill you climb.

And – perhaps – as you crest the hill and squint against the low light and cloud, you see something: the shadowy outlines of the beasts of our stories beginning to return.

Scots glossary:
Bogle: monster, ghost, supernatural creature
Lowped: leaped, jumped
Water-deevil: Water-devil
Mind: remember

To read more stories like this, sign up to our newsletter here

Rosie Beetschen is the communications officer for Cairngorms Connect, and Megan Jones is a Peatland Restoration Field Officer for the RSPB.
The peatland work at RSPB Scotland's Abernethy National Nature Reserve is funded by Peatland Action administered by the Cairngorms National Park Peatland ACTION team