Saturated with stories - a research poem about peatlands

By Abbi Flint (WetFutures UK team)

Photo of poetry postbox on Ilkley Moor by B. Jennings

In November last year, Ben Jennings and I published an open  access article in the journal Time and Mind on how the archaeology and folklore of peatlands might play a role in how people engage with and think about these landscapes. 
 
The article is open access, so anyone can read it, but we realise that not everyone wants to read academic articles. As I write poetry outside of my day job, I was keen to explore the potential of using poetry as a creative way of sharing the Ideas we had written about. The poem below aims to do that, creatively responding to key ideas from the article, but exploring these in a poetic way.   

You can watch a video that Ben Jennings has put together, with me reading the poem over images of Ilkley Moor, here: https://youtu.be/o1VlbEuVJOI, and the full text of the poem is below.

---

Saturated with Stories
Peatlands blur water and earth, a shape- 
shifting land where past and present collapse  
where nature and culture entangle.  
If we listen, what story will they tell? 

This story begins before words with trees 
cleared by people, by climate, to form peat. 

This story begins with absence from maps 
wastelands to be tamed and drained into use 
damage that outlasts generations. 

This story begins with Holmes on a mire  
haunted and dangerous. Wild tales of moors 
as ancient and alien. It’s a story  
of other-than-human, of black moor-dogs 
of bottomless depths, of Will-o’-the-Wisps 
faeries that dwell in watery places. 
Where bodies are not lost but 
intentionally interred in liminal spaces.  

This story begins with people. Of living  
and working, burying and remembering,  
healing, forgetting, walking                 to escape. 

This story is unspoken, needs science 
to translate what was quietly written  
in archives of pollen and fragments. 

This is a story of wilderness managed 
for water, for carbon, for nature  
as a resource for our future.  This is 

            a story of balance. 

                        On Ilkley Moor, a peaty palimpsest 
                        from Neolithic to today, written in 
                        traces of settlements and standing stones 
                        rocks carved and circled for reasons unknown. 

                        Where a giant’s wife spilled Skirtfuls of Stones 
                        giving way to big cats and UFOs. 
                        ‘Metropolis of hydros’, the ‘mountain spa’ 
                        where a song warns of going out baht’at 
                        and where Darwin came for the ‘water cure’.  

                        Today, Stanza Stones are etched with poetry 
                        and ancient paths trace crash-sites through sheep-folds  
                        to quarries, where land was made to work 
                        where commoners hold rights to graze and walk. 

            These stories re-enchant peatlands. 

Stories that are still being written, an  
‘unbroken dialogue’ with more than one  
voice. Widening the lens changes our view 
of peatlands as plural, old and new. 
What futures tales will tell of crashed bikes 
of curlew, of poetry, of rewetted bogs? 
Shared stories make space for shared ownership  
where we all play our part in the telling  
and co-create new forms of heritage. 

​Peatlands are saturated with stories.  

In writing this piece, I’ve been inspired by work on poetic inquiry as a research method (e.g. Faulkner, 2020) and as a way of engaging with and communicating research findings (for more examples of this check out the science poetry journal Consilience  and the recent University of Bradford Continuing Bonds creative dissemination project). Of course, this is also part of a rich tradition of writing about archaeology and landscape through poetry (see also our WetFutures Ireland colleagues Ben and Rosie's piece on Seamus Heaney’s ‘bog poetry’). 

What do you think? Is poetry a useful way to share ideas and research about peatland heritage?  

​We’d love to hear your thoughts either in the comment box below or on twitter (@WetFutures)