FIONOLA MEREDITHgets down and dirty at the Northern Ireland Bog Snorkelling Championships
‘DON’T THINK about it: just put your head down and kick like billy-o” – this is the advice of 15-year-old Dineka Maguire, last year’s junior bog-snorkelling champion. I inwardly repeat Dineka’s words as I lower myself, whimpering quietly, into the murky, freezing water of Derryhubbert Bog, at Peatlands Park in Co Tyrone. The challenge is to complete two consecutive lengths of a 55-metre water-filled trench cut through the peat bog – and all in the shortest time possible. Rules are strict at the Northern Ireland Bog Snorkelling Championships: no conventional swimming strokes are allowed – you’re supposed to rely on flipper power alone – and your snorkel must stay in place at all times. The race course ahead of me is fringed with multi-coloured bunting and clumps of bog cotton blowing gaily in the breeze, but the water looks dark and foreboding. A soft, drizzly rain is falling. Race judge Colm Reavey gets his boat hook ready, in case I need rescuing.
To the strains of I've Got A Brand New Combine Harvesterbooming over the tannoy, as well as a few encouraging cheers from spectators, I kick off in a plume of muddy water. My mask has steamed up, so I can't see where I am going, but I keep on thrashing away until about three quarters of the way along the course, when I realise I can't breathe any more. So I stop, put my feet down and, fatally, pop the snorkel out of my mouth. Instant disqualification.
“I did tell you the snorkelling was tough,” commiserates event organiser Colin Gates. “The secret is not to go too fast at the start, or you run out of breath: your body feels like it’s crying out for oxygen. You’ve got to pace yourself.” So much for going like billy-o.
But it’s different for the experts: local man Conor Murphy is the current world champion and the hero of the bog-snorkelling world, completing last year’s course in 1 minute, :25.87 seconds. Murphy grew up about five miles from the bog, where his own grandfather had once cut turf. He has been styled as the “bad boy of bog snorkelling” after he tried to use his victory speech at last year’s World Championships in Llanwrtyd Wells in Wales to instigate an inter-sport feud with Tiger Woods. Staring into a television camera, Murphy said: “Woods, you wouldn’t last five minutes in a bog.” He then reportedly snapped a golf club over his knee and tossed it into the mud, to the cheers of the “Ultras”, a group of hardcore bog-snorkelling fans.
Murphy is unable to defend his crown at this year’s Northern Ireland championships, so the field is considered wide open.
Muddy frolics aside, the event does have a serious purpose. It is timed to coincide with International Bog Day, and Colin Gates says the event is an attempt “to highlight the plight of our few remaining peat bogs, 96 per cent of which have been destroyed since 1945, and to advise people what they can do to preserve them.” Horticultural peat use is the main culprit, and the message to gardeners is that peat is better in the bog than in the bag.
It is also an opportunity to introduce the public to the beauty and biodiversity of bogs, which are home to all sorts of rare plants and animals. Gates shows me a clump of bladderwort – a carnivorous plant with underwater leaves that traps and digests small aquatic creatures – and, growing nearby, a sundew, with its ring of sticky hairs that cleverly capture air-borne insects.
Following my efforts in the snorkelling challenge, I am rewarded with a wallow in the malodorous “bog jacuzzi” – so-called because of the naturally-occurring methane gas bubbles breaking the surface. Once in, the texture and colour resembles chocolate mousse, and despite the smell, it is surprisingly restful to feel your body suspended in the thick sludge of the bog.
Afterwards, I am directed to a spot behind the female changing tent, where a man on a scaffold is waiting with a power hose hooked up to a generator. He revs it up and soon all traces of bog debris are swiftly blasted away, leaving me fresh, clean and exhilarated. I feel as if I have undergone some kind of bizarre beauty ritual.
“You’ll be back next year?” asks Colin Gates as I sling my flippers over my shoulder. And, you know, I rather think I might.
