A bog walk a decade ago unlocked the door to another realm for photographer Tina Claffey. Botanist and geologist John Feehan led the walk in her local bog in Killaun, Co Offaly in 2012 and gave everyone a small hand lens. Through this, Claffey got her first glimpse of the intricate beauty under our feet. The world of stuff too small to be seen with the naked eye was transformed, and she had a kind of Alice-like tumble into wonder. “It was a walk that changed the course of my life,” she writes.
Claffey bought a macro lens for her camera to capture what she had seen. Her work often involves lying fully flat on the surface of bogs to allow us to see more deeply. And in her newly-published Portal: Otherworldly Wonders of Ireland’s Bogs, Wetlands and Eskers, she writes beautifully about how the bog and its inhabitants set the rhythm for the work. She follows the lead of the land and thanks the creatures for letting her take their portraits. The notes to the eerily exquisite photographs capture that personal relationship to the bog as well as plenty of identifying information from a team of experts. It is, she explains, “a gathering of observations, for I am a mere observer”.
Divided into seasons, the book opens with the bog builder that is sphagnum moss, the plant that is now believed to provide the compound that preserves bog bodies for millenniums. Sphagnum can hold 20 times its weight in water, and Claffey’s photograph shows its deep vibrant colours like a coral reef made of jelly flowers.
Along with spending quality armchair time with Portal, I’ve been listening to Annie Proulx’s Fen Bog and Swamp. The book, which grew from an essay, is an epic look at wetlands across the globe. We have demonised bogs until recently, mapped them as unproductive places needing to be drained or exploited, milled by industrial machinery into polluting fuel or a moisture-holding growing medium for cultivated plants. The novelist says studies that have counted the microorganisms which live in sphagnum moss show that every square metre of the moss can contain an estimated one billion of them.
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Portal has sphagnum moss and so much more. There’s a marsh fritillary’s wing that becomes a Bayeaux tapestry of overlapping scales. In the winter pages, the bare flower head remnants of wild angelica which look like “tiny fireworks, each one frosted with ice crystals”. The book is a gem, a profound way of seeing and feeding our souls with the richness of the fragments we have left, habitats we have an urgent duty to protect and restore.
Portal is on permanent exhibition in the visitor’s centre at Lullymore Heritage and Discovery Park in Kildare. The book is available to order here
