Fertile future for the cutaway desert

IN the half-light of December the central plain of Ireland unrolls a low-key landscape in which neither nature nor people seem disposed to much excitement. Grey scrawl of ash above the murky hedges; cock pheasant wandering a silent, rushy field; spinney of purple birches merging into dusk... images from the autumn calendar punctuate one's reverie at the train window.

Nudged by a distant glimpse of a power station or one of Bord na Mona's peat-and-plastic deserts, most of us have wondered what they'll do with the midland raised-bog landscape when it's all cut away. Give it to Coillte for trees, to farmers for grass - the closer we get to actual exhaustion of the bogs, the less public concern there seems to be for any more inspiring alternatives.

Yet, as John Feehan reminds us in The Bogs of Ireland, a weighty treasure of a book just published by The Environmental Institute of UCD, this is the chance to create from the cutaway peat a new midland wilderness of lakes and woodland, with its own unpredictable ecology and vigour.

Recent emphasis has all been on preserving the remaining handful of uncut, undrained raised bogs - a tiny percentage of the area of original peatland. But in no sense, says John Feehan, can these isolated fragments take the place of the lost peat wilderness.

A climate changed by global warming could make these isolated, watery reserves very difficult to manage - museum-pieces, even, off-limits to the general public. But the loosely-linked zones of cut-over peat make up a very extensive area: "Only they can provide the experience of nature in the midland landscape of a future time."

Already, the old hand-cut turbaries have become a complex mosaic of habitats. There are birchwoods full of fungi, long stretches of heather, fens full of orchids and insects and aquatic life. The diversity of this peaty maze makes the old turbaries the most important ecological areas in the midlands - even, John Feehan suggests, meriting designation as Natural Heritage Areas!

The industrial cutaway, left to its own devices, is capable of astonishing enrichment in a very short time. Turraun, a bog near Pollagh, in north Offaly, was in mechanical production even before Bord na Mona arrived, and in the phasing out which began in the 170s, about 120 hectares of it was deliberately abandoned to nature.

Now, after less than two decades, about 160 species of flowering plants and ferns have settled into occupation. Among the first colonists was an alga that bound the unstable peat dust with golden threads; another was marsh arrowgrass, snaking out from the drains on to the bare, wet peat. On most of the drier cutaway, a rich grassland has grown up, but already, birch and sally are taking over. Over 50 species of bird have been recorded, the grey partridge (now rare) is actually breeding there, and Bord na Mona have flooded part of the bog to attract water birds, especially in winter.

How attitudes have changed! Scarcely 40 years ago, an important review of Ireland's bog development, published in Advancement Of Science, made no mention whatever of conservation or ecology. When harvesting was over, "reversion to a scrub-like condition" was something to be avoided at all costs.

Most of the ecosystems that replace the bogs, especially in a warmer world, will not resemble peatlands as we know them. A fascinating photograph in the book shows Scots pine already invading the edge of the bog at Boora - a reminder of the colonisation by pine in the warm spell around 2,500 B.C. which left the bogs studded with tree-stumps and roots.

In the old bogholes and drains of cutover turbary a resurgence of sphagnum mosses shows that regeneration of bog is possible - but not very probable on the brown plains of milled peat, or in conditions of global warming. Restoring raised bog needs a foundation of at least a metre-and-a-half of fen peat, a mean annual temperature lower than 11 degrees and some intact bog nearby to provide a seed-bank.

Coillte's disappointment with conifer growth on the cutaway bog (largely because of frost), and today's question marks over the future of green-based farming, make it all the more logical that the new landscape of the Midlands should be a mosaic of commercial and natural uses.

Just by ceasing to pump out the drains, a number of bogs near the Shannon will provide new lakes. Others could grow reed-beds, both for wildlife and as a natural, "green" system for the treatment and filtration of town sewage. Drier cutover bog can grow biomass willow for fuel or the finer stuff for cane furniture. Alternative crops range from cranberries to rhubarb - which, in woody fen peat, can grow stalks two metres long and 15 cm thick.

That's the sort of way-out fact that tends to lodge in the mind from browsing on this incredibly inclusive compendium, which, with 500-odd pages and masses of maps and drawings and colour plates, reminds me of the bottom-shelf encyclopedias that used to keep me quiet as a child.

John Feehan has been joined by Grace O'Donovan, a research scientist at UCC, for the natural history chapters, so that the fascinating post-glacial origins and chemistry of every class of bog is complemented by the biology of all that grows and moves and flutters over them. As for people, the human culture of the bog, in all its ingenuity, stretches from the prehistoric microliths of Boora to the highest tech of Bord na Mona.

The book costs £48 - a lair price indeed for so much enlightenment.