‘A bog is a library nobody can read’: the nature writer rewriting the story of Britain’s peatlands

Tom Ashworth is standing up to his knees in a hole on Saddleworth Moor and could not be happier. “Feel that,” he says, handing over a fistful of something black and cold and faintly fibrous. “That’s about 4,000 years old. Bronze age. There were people up here with axes when that was growing, and it’s been sitting there ever since, and we’ve spent 200 years trying to drain it, burn it, dig it up and put it in grow bags.”

Ashworth, 41, a former secondary school geography teacher from Oldham, has spent four years walking Britain’s blanket bogs for his first book, Blanket, published this week. It is already being spoken of as the most significant work of British nature writing since the genre’s boom a decade ago, and one of the few to take as its subject a landscape most people actively dislike. “Nobody writes love letters to the bog,” he says. “It’s wet, it’s brown, it’s flat and it smells. I wanted to know why I kept coming back.”

The answer the book arrives at is partly ecological and partly historical. Britain has more blanket bog than any other country in Europe, about 10% of its land area, and that bog stores more carbon than all its forests combined. But Ashworth’s real interest is in what he calls the “library nobody can read”: the pollen, insects, hair and occasionally bodies that peat preserves in anaerobic layers, a record of 10,000 years that is being lost at a rate of about 1cm of surface a year to erosion, drainage and fire.

The book moves from the Pennine moors above his hometown, where Victorian mill soot turned the sphagnum black, to the Flow Country of Caithness and Sutherland, where 1980s tax breaks funded the planting of conifer forests on land that could not support them. Ashworth is scathing about both episodes but resists easy villains. “The men who dug the drains thought they were improving the land. The foresters thought they were creating jobs. They were wrong, but they weren’t stupid, and the people telling you what to do with the uplands now might be wrong too.”

Blanket is also, unusually for the genre, funny. There is a chapter on the particular misery of bog-walking in October (“you do not walk across a bog so much as negotiate with it”), a long and affectionate portrait of a retired drainage engineer in Yorkshire who now spends his weekends blocking the ditches he dug in 1979, and a running argument with the author’s own mother about why anyone would want to go up there at all.

Ashworth left teaching in 2022 to finish the book and says he has not decided whether to go back. “I miss the kids. I don’t miss marking.” He is already planning a second book, on Britain’s saltmarshes. “Also wet, also brown, also unloved. I think I’ve found my niche.”

Blanket: A Journey Through Britain’s Bogs by Tom Ashworth is published by Fell Press (£20).