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Dams in the Black Mire: Healing Scotland's Flow Country
Callum pulled his waterproof collar tight against the sleet, his rubber boots sinking five inches into copper-coloured bog moss. Ahead of him across the expanse of Caithness, the northern horizon dissolved into endless pewter sky and horizontal drizzle. Beside a deep artificial furrow, a wide-tracked excavator idle-churned its diesel engine, its seven-ton chassis listing dangerously toward an ancient drainage gully. It was the disastrous tax loopholes of the nineteen-eighties that had scarred this remote plateau, when private forestry syndicates plowed thousands of miles of deep furrows to plant rows of alien Sitka spruce. What had once been Europe's greatest continuous blanket bog had been systematically bled of its moisture.
Nowhere in the British Isles does peatland hold such staggering volumes of sequestered carbon. Yet for four