PEATLAND HISTORY AND RED BOGS.
Thanks to all those people
who have suggested references in response to my
questions on peatland history. Your comments tend to
support my impression that while one can find references
to peatland decline in pre twentieth century literature
references to the need for conservation are very rare
until well into this century. The further you go back
in time the more the writers of the time seem to think
of bogs as a total waste of space (King's 1685 comments
on Irish bogs described by H. Rydin are a good eg).
Daniel Defoe (1726) made similar comments about Chat
Moss near Manchester (a site I am currently working on)
writing'What nature ment by such a useless production,
tis hard to imagine; but the land is entirely waste,
exept for poor cottages fuel, and the quantity used for
that is very small'.
I am slowly collecting references such as these (its
slow work, you can really only find them by accident
while reading the old literature). One day I hope to get
round to a small paper on the history of the idea of
peatland decline and conservation.
On Red bogs. I find the range of possible explanations
very interesting. Mosses, grass species, sedges etc. I
suspect that different 'red bogs' in different parts of
Europe could have been so called for different plant
species (and even iron deposits). Are there sites called
'red bog' in other parts of the world?
best wishes
David M Wilkinson
Biology and Earth Sciences
Liverpool John Moores University
Byrom Street
Liverpool L3 3AF
UK
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