Eight

Foulshaw – A Lost History of Peat

I went looking for the place where the sea comes closest to my home. I wanted to witness the outfall of the River Kent into the bay. The river makes its final meanderings close to the magical topiary gardens of Levens Hall and on between flood embankments at Sampool. Here the Kent makes a final series of turns that cut the land into jigsaw pieces before it begins to widen only a wing beat away from the sands and finally pours itself out to the wider world.

From these utterly flat lands the river’s birthplace, the mountains of Kentmere, form a distant backdrop. On that March morning the tops were smoothed over, white with even more fresh snow. The wind was a blast from the north and icy cold, bringing tears to the eyes as I walked towards the bay along the Foulshaw road.

A small group of swans were feeding in a field and a pair of crows took to the air, moving down the lane ahead of me like gothic tour guides. They flew lazily, keeping within the confines of the black hawthorn hedgerows, the light silvering their backs with an oily gleam. One after the other they peeled away, leaving me a solitary figure walking down the road.

I followed the direction of a footpath sign for the Cumbria Way across fields and at last the path led under the protection of the embankment. Thank God – that wind was the fiercest and coldest I’d felt for years. There was a feeling of walking in a sunken lane, the bank is the width of seven or eight men and was just high enough to stop me from seeing anything beyond it.

Too soon the bank peeled away, swinging across the field edge. I knew that on its far side the River Kent entered the bay, but there was no alternative but to keep to the path alongside substantial fencing. Large pools of standing water in field depressions were coloured silver and splashed with wintry blue. A scattering of sheep cropped at the grass oblivious to the cold. I walked past a line of ancient hawthorns, maybe a quarter of a mile in length. Their erratic growth patterns must mirror how the wind comes from all directions here. Strings of sheep’s wool garlanded their lower branches.

The bank swung back again across the field to rejoin the path. I passed through a small gate and at last I was able to climb onto the top of the bank to see the meeting of river and bay. The extreme blast of freezing wind that greeted me, and that battered me around the head and face, brought more blurry tears.

But there was the marsh, dotted with skeletal winter-black gorse bushes, and with the tide far out, the channel and path of the Kent was clear, moving towards Sandside and Arnside and the south, and surrounded by the ochre distances of the sands. The sun moved behind bands of high cloud and the light became suddenly monochrome, making the farmland and marsh almost devoid of colour. I saw a red post van travelling up the lane from Low Foulshaw, the only coloured object in the whole landscape. There were sheep out on the marsh; I envied them their apparent obliviousness to the cold. On the edge of the channel a pair of mallard was silhouetted. Two more took off from a field and flew towards the bay with steady wing-beats. They passed overhead and I could see the way their bodies articulated, hinging slightly up and down as they moved through the freezing air.

The Kent flowed on towards Arnside and the railway viaduct, its piers and gaps in turns blocking and revealing the steel-coloured path of the river beyond. Two walkers, black against the light, appeared in the distance walking along the top of the bank; at least they had the wind behind them. They were walking away from the next tiny coastal settlement of Ulpha, named from the Old Norse for wolf. I could imagine this landscape being roamed by wolves now – good pickings with the sheep on the marsh. At Ulpha there’s just one farm backed by a hilly, wooded outcrop and closer to the coast a single cottage.

I walked further, but eventually, defeated by the cold, I moved down into the shelter of the bank again. A train blew a warning haw-hee as it approached the viaduct. A drainage channel ran in confluence with the bank, the water in it like treacle, and hawthorn branches hung over the path where sheltered sheep haunts were revealed by tatters of mossy wool. I found one white shoe that had become subsumed by the grass; it grew inside and around it. I wondered about its provenance: why one shoe? And why here, on the sheltered side of the bank? It looked far too new, too clean to have been washed up by the tide.

From the far side of the bank I heard the distinctive call of geese in flight. They appeared, winging low; pink-foots, whooshing right overhead. I counted 22. The sound of geese, and the sight of them, has always been a complete symbol of the wild for me. In Ulverston, I’d heard them passing high overheard in skeins. Sometimes I’d be in bed at night and the sound came travelling in through the open window through the pitch dark. When that call comes in over the airwaves, I have to stop whatever I’m doing and, with a slight pitch in the heart, I’ll race to the window and look upwards; the small miracle of geese.

* * *

As I walked back towards the fields, there came from the far side of the bank the unmistakeable sound of curlew, but it was magnified many times and intensified rapidly. A second later a shape-shifting flock of 50 or even 60 curlew materialised above the embankment, rising skyward with a shimmer of movement. Their marled colouring feathered the sky. Mirage-like they pulsed against grey clouds. I’d never seen so many in one place before; it was an extraordinary sight. I watched them, revelling in them. Moments later a small flock of starlings flowed into view behind the curlew. The movement amongst the curlew was one of agitation; they rose and fell in wave form.

Out of nowhere a peregrine dropped out of the sky like a dark stone. It pierced the starling flock, and with the acuity of a marksman it picked out a bird. I saw the starling struggling momentarily but within seconds any movement had stopped.

The panicked starling flock dropped as one towards the ground then streamed low, skimming the fields towards a sheltering line of Scots pines, and the curlew retreated again behind the bank. The peregrine seemed to be making heavy weather of its kill, struggling to keep height and direction of travel. Then two tiny birds, no bigger than goldfinches, flew after the hawk and began to mob and harass it. The bigger bird struggled. It strove to move away, eventually coming to land in a bank of hawthorn. My freezing morning had struck gold.

As I walked back up the road, a flock of chaffinches took flight from the hedgerow like a handful of pink and grey leaves snatched away by the wind.

* * *

I came to Foulshaw again a week or so later, but this time to Foulshaw Moss, a vast area that was in the process of being restored back to its original manifestation as blanket bog.

You can see the moss from miles away. Even from the distant vantage point of Scout Scar near Kendal, Foulshaw Moss stands out, appearing like a vast pale oasis amidst all the green of fields and woodland at the edge of the bay.

I’d gone with my friend Brian Fereday, whose family was one of the last to carry on cutting peat on the moss until recent years. It was as much a part of their lives as the growing of vegetables. As we walked, he began to orientate himself, remembering the area of ground they’d last worked.

We walked onto the moss through a gap in a line of scrubby birch trees that bordered the lane, then out onto a semi-wetland, last year’s grass as bleached by the weather as old straw. The ground was hummocky and rough, with pools of standing water.

‘I’m pretty sure it was here. Yes, it was. They’re letting it flood again now, no drainage happening any more. You see the line of that bank? That was the working edge, the face of the peat, and the spreading ground behind it, where you left the cut peats to dry out.’ I saw features beginning to emerge.

‘Traditionally the men cut the peat and the women turned it; you had to keep turning it until a skin formed.

‘In the past the big landowners had control of the cuttings, going back centuries. Families paid annual rent for a “moss room” – great name, eh? It’s all documented, and each peat cutter had to keep their part of the moss drained to keep it dry. There was a main drain down the centre and side drains – all run by gravity and sluice gates. There’s one that still works now, just over the far end of the moss, at Ulpha.’ And Brian pointed out towards the bay.

I looked out across the huge space backed by a broken line of shelter-belt pines and here and there single trees that had been cut off, I guessed, at three-quarters of their original height. It seemed more like the aftermath of a war zone than a nature reserve, but still I half expected a marsh harrier, or some other raptor, to hove into sight – the broken trees seemed ideal perches for hunting.

‘To come here to cut peat, you had to make an effort. That’s a good principle,’ Brian said. ‘You’d take out what you needed. No more.

‘It used to be a big place for gulls to nest, lesser black-backed mainly, and people came gull-egging. I never fancied eating them myself though. There’s curlew too; in late spring dozens of them nest out on the drier ground. In the past the landowners used it for shooting, wildfowling. If you had a dog and let it run loose and disturb the birds, the dog could be destroyed – if they found out. We’re talking 1700s here. But in our time, in the 1960s, the moss was planted up by the Forestry Commission. They filled the place with pines and spruce but they never came to much. This ground’s too wet for trees so the timber was poor – you’d think they’d have known that.’

Many of the shelter-belt trees around the edges of the moss appeared drunken, tilting at angles, leaning into one another as if for support.

‘They don’t look too happy now,’ I said, indicating towards them.

‘Aye – what’s left will fall eventually, but that’ll set up a new environment of decaying timber. What goes around, eh?’

Under foot the moss banks were bouncy, springy to walk on.

‘We’ll go and have a look at the boardwalk.’

We stepped up onto the higher ground of the bank and close by a snipe rose out of a drainage channel, jigging away, following the line of trees by the path. My feet squelched through the bog and a tideline formed on my boots. I could see the line of the bank following the birches back up towards the main road.

‘The best peat came from further down in the ground, where it’d been under greater pressure; on its way to being coal. If you dropped it on hard ground it would break apart like china. That was the best.’

As we walked, my eyes continued to adjust to the landscape as it had been, making out features: drainage channels, pools and peat edges, now a maze of banks and water.

‘To my untrained eyes it all looks primeval, as if it had never been managed… well, apart from the broken trees,’ I said.

‘But what man makes, eventually will be unmade. This new regime, they call it “re-wilding” nowadays, don’t they? They’ll restore it back to the original landscape, though there are plenty of locals who don’t see why you can’t have both.’

A pair of ravens passed close, lazy wing-beats carrying them off towards the bay. We stopped to look down at a pool full of frogspawn, frozen, dead to the world.

‘This winter; it’s never-ending.’

We came to an old section of boardwalk, the first to be built when the site was taken on by the Cumbria Wildlife Trust. But as the level of the water in the moss increases with the blocking of drains, so the boards, like the ground itself, rose and sank and in places the cambered edges were lapped at by black, peaty bog water. This part of the moss was a different ecology: stands of young birches were being established (get the birches in first and the rest will follow). Scot’s pines a way off, scrub willow, bog myrtle and dark purple heathers. We heard the high-pitched tsee, tsee, tsee of long-tailed tits and eventually they broke cover, rising into the air and filtering into the top of a birch.

Near the end of the walkway we came to a simple square-built shed. Brian told me that each family had had a hut like this, a place to keep a peat barrow and spades, and to store peats for a year or so to carry on drying out.

We peered inside and there, abandoned, like an object in a museum, a peat barrow. It was a primitive hand-built affair with wooden handles, a metal frame and a large-diameter wheel sinking into the compacted floor of the shed. A wooden board was fixed to the underneath of the supports, and in the barrow itself, a few pieces of peat, broken, exposing their crumbly, dark interior.

‘A good place for insects to hole up,’ Brian said, and he picked up a piece of the peat and broke it into two halves, a dusty residue minutely clouding the air around it. More pieces littered the earth floor.

‘See the wooden board? That was to stop the barrow sinking into the ground when it was fully loaded.’ Then he seemed pensive, and said, ‘I didn’t know this was still here. Thought it’d gone with all the others. In two or three years the whole place has been cleared of all this. It was a way of life, gone forever now though.’

And I thought that if it hadn’t been for this last piece of evidence, I’d not have fully understood. The ground of the old ‘moss room’ was in transition; it hadn’t fully become its new re-naturalised self and just enough of the old remained to see it as part of a rich historic seam. The evidence was there on the ground – once you’d got your eye in.

* * *

Skip forward to the back end of summer a year later. At Foulshaw the collapsing boardwalk had gone, the peat cutters’ hut too. There was a swanky new boardwalk out into the moss, and a viewing place where you might have the luck to spot an osprey. This season three chicks had fledged from a nest built in the top of a Scot’s pine. On the day I went to meet the reserve warden, a single chick remained in the nest. The parent birds had both already set off on the migration back to Senegal, the female leaving shortly after the chicks had fledged, and the male some time later. He has the job of staying to look after the kids, feeding them and teaching them until it’s time for him to go too. Then finally the chicks set off, each one travelling separately. There’s a yellow sign at the roadside now, ‘Foulshaw Ospreys’, and a new, clean interpretation shed, new gravel for car tyres to crunch over.

‘Ospreys have been coming here since 2008,’ the reserve warden, John Dunbavin, told me. ‘But this is the first time they’ve bred successfully. When they first came in, they were immature birds, offspring from other breeding sites in the area. The whole thing’s documented on our nest camera. It’s on the website too with a blog people can follow.

‘They’re faithful to their nest site, so if we can attract them in using ready-built nest platforms, and if they breed successfully, the chances are they’ll return year on year.’

The Cumbrian osprey story started further north in Bassenthwaite with the first birds arriving in 2001 after an absence of 150 years. They’re well established there now, and the young birds are spreading their wings, returning to England from migration to find new territory in Kielder Water in Northumberland, in Esthwaite and now here beside the bay. I’d heard talk last summer of ospreys seen fishing over the bay, and this place, well, the larder’s a mere wing beat or two away.

‘They’re amazing birds,’ John said. ‘Well, they all are; the whole business of migration. They have a genetic magnet inside their heads.’ I liked the image.

‘We’ve had some fantastic sightings of them, flying overhead with fish in their talons. They really are the icing on the cake for us.’ As John talked, I peered through his telescope at the last chick, though it seemed fully grown. Immobile, dare I say statuesque, with its dark, hooked bill, yellow eye and white chest colourings.

‘It’ll be off any time now, any day. Then its fingers crossed for next year.’

We turned our focus to the ground itself. I told John of being here with Brian, and about the changing order of things.

‘It’s impossible to keep everyone happy. Whatever you do, someone’s not going to like it. Some of the locals have complained, saying that blocking off the drains is causing flooding further up the valley, but it’s just not possible. You have to have an eye on the future. A big peat bog like this is a carbon sink. Peat bogs trap carbon, which is a necessary thing these days. It works globally, not just locally.

‘Before we started work on the site, the peat bog was drying out, and if it carried on drying out it wouldn’t be able to do its job of storing carbon. Now it’s a Site of Special Scientific Interest. It’s a Natura 2000 site too, designated as important for habitats, important nationally and internationally.

‘When I first started here, you could walk across the whole moss in trainers. You couldn’t attempt that now. In terms of wildlife we’ve got dragonflies, frogs, birds. We’ve had a hobby hunting down here in the evenings, feeding on swallows and house martins. And it’s a supermarket for bats down here.’

I made a mental note to come back much further into the spring and on a warm evening.

‘Burning peat though, it’s just not sustainable; digging it up releases carbon, and if you burn it, it releases more. People are more aware these days, certainly about peat from England and Ireland, but the problem just moves further out. It’s shifted to Eastern Europe now, where it’s being dug out in vast quantities.’

Although it was just over a year since I’d last been to Foulshaw, there was a palpable change in the landscape. The water levels had risen; it would be impossible to set off to walk anywhere now, even across the old peat cuttings that Brian had brought to life again.

‘We’ve been draining wetlands for agriculture since Roman times,’ John said. ‘In this country alone we’ve lost 96% of raised lowland bogs, so it’s really important to restore it. At one time this whole area at the northern end of the bay was one continuous peat bog: Foulshaw Moss, Meathop Moss, Nichols Moss, Stakes Moss and the Winster Valley.’

I knew that this was why the cross-sands route was used until the railway came; the only other route involved a tortuous and lengthy detour over high roads and steep inclines over the fells to the north of the moss.

‘Over the centuries the mosses were gradually drained. Even though it seems large, and it is, Foulshaw is really an isolated fragment. It’s all that’s left.’

Like a relic from the past that’s been buried, smothered by vegetation and released again into the world. I left John with a sense of the imperative of not only managing this site, but of the importance – no, crucial need – for active conservation. Just after my visit I’d heard a scientist on the radio talking about his lifelong study of bees: ‘I don’t get what’s not to like about conservation. What’s the matter with politicians? Don’t they get it? Conservation is the future.’

I took a final look back at the nest. The osprey was standing up, beating its wings and stretching them out. I felt, if I stayed on, I might just see it leave for Africa.

* * *

There’s another story about being buried and revealed again, something that would’ve remained undiscovered had peat cutting not been such an integral part of life here. Reading the literature on the archaeology of Morecambe Bay, it’s thought that early man’s occupation of the area was patchy at best. Of course there are finds and evidence, but this story is about something wrought out of collective and purposeful action by a sizeable community.

In 1897 peat cutters began work on a previously long undisturbed and isolated area of Stakes Moss, lying to the north of Foulshaw. They discovered a ‘trackway’ and the find has been described as ‘the most impressive archaeological structure recorded from the South Cumbrian wetlands’.14

An eyewitness, J.A. Barnes, described what the peat cutters found:

Cross timbers laid side by side on three lines of supporting logs parallel to the direction of the road. The larger timbers, some of them 2 feet 6 inches thick, had been split and laid face downwards; the smaller ones were left entire. At short intervals along each side of the road, pointed stakes (perhaps the origin of the name Stakes Moss), had been driven deep into the peat to keep the supports from slipping outwards. We dug out one intact, and the point was 3 feet below the level of the road. No nails whether of iron or wood, were observed. The material is mostly birch... When first got out it has almost the consistency and appearance of gingerbread, and may be cut easily with a spade, but it shrinks and hardens when exposed to the air. It is not rotten, but, as it were, pickled in the juices of the peat.15

I love this description; I’m almost there with them, smelling the acidy earth and seeing the centuries-old timbers revealed, ‘pickled in the juices of the peat’. But as with the raising of the Marie Rose, the sudden change of environment and atmosphere induced chemical changes immediately upon contact with air.

The diggers saw distinct axe-markings on many of the logs, and from the marks they reasoned the cutting edge of the axe to be one and a half inches across, perhaps a ‘finishing’ axe. No doubt the axes used to fell the timber to make the trackway were of a larger configuration. In total, the section revealed was 15 to 16 feet wide and 50 yards long.

Half a mile south, another section was discovered, but here the trackway ran continuously for 180 yards. Barnes wrote:

I remember when quite a child hearing mention made of a wooden road buried in the peat moss, and when the piece before us was discovered I imagined it was the one I had heard of before.

But on making further enquiries I found they were wide apart, and after considerable grovelling in bramble-grown ditches I discovered traces of the other piece on both edges of the moss... [If the two sections intersected] it would be at an angle of perhaps 60° near the River Gilpin.

They were probably branches of a single road from the east which forked after crossing the [River] Gilpin, one branch going north towards Lyth and Bowness, the other towards Witherslack and Furness.16

So here was evidence of early man planning and building a trackway to help them traverse the moss and take them to the river. Their settlements were likely to have been higher up on the flanks of Whitbarrow and Helsington, but here, at the intersection of their road, was the river – an obvious source of food. The trackway, and the people who made it, have been dated to mid-Bronze Age, 1550 to 1250 BC.

I like too that idea of Barnes’, that there were rumours, other sightings if you like, from the past. The idea that trackways had been glimpsed before and recorded by nothing more sophisticated than the telling of stories. And all those layers of time; the laying down and combining of time and moss and water and the formation of peat over centuries. All that continuous, unobserved chemistry.

Back into the 21st century, if the mosses are to remain protected there’s little chance of further archaeological surveying. Until the arrival of sophisticated new detection equipment, other evidence will stay hidden. And as time moves further into the future, any talk of roadways underneath the peat will become just another local rumour, a story to tell in the pub or to the grandchildren, something passed down the generations.