ANOTHER LIFE:A LITTLE LINE of white dots on the distant flank of the mountain means that someone, at least, has a few bags of dry turf to burn. They're last year's, perhaps, but I don't really know, for the old bog road has largely passed out of our ken, as it has for most people around, writes Michael Viney.
A mere decade ago, the contractors' 'sausage machines' were still extruding lines of turf for everyone, and by summer's end the bog glittered with bulging fertiliser bags ready to haul home. And rather longer before that - say 30 years - I was caught up in the traditional spring exodus to the hill: first, get the potatoes in, then cut the turf.
On a good April day, with flooding sunshine and a breeze off the sea, it was a spectacle fit for a sermon by Dev or a painting by Keating: the dip and twist of white-shirted men with sleans, the groups of women and children stooping to foot the drier sods. Even donkeys and dogs conspired to a cheerful, callisthenic domesticity. In a sodden, gloomy spring, however - and there were many - the Gulag labour and torment of midges called for particular stoicism.
Will it happen again, as oil soars even higher and the building stops and the men are back home on the land? They must be hoping not. But the oil-fired ranges in sparkling new kitchens could, at length, become quite a burden.
Next week's big International Peat Congress at Tullamore, Co Offaly, has a wide-open title - After Wise Use: The Future of Peatlands - and topics with a global spread from Tibet and Indonesia to Latvia and Lesotho. Peat invites a whole academy of sciences, not least those to do with scenarios for climate change. Bogs store carbon, and the destruction of Indonesia's forested peatlands released nearly two billion tonnes of carbon a year in smoke and gases. That will give a special edge to the session on tropical peatlands, its keynote speaker from Indonesia's own peat technocracy.
Compared with such cataclysmic use (much of it, ironically, to plant palm oil trees for biofuel), the steady shaving away of Ireland's midland peat by Bord na Móna might seem to have made only modest contribution to the carbon piling up in the atmosphere. But even the small-scale peat extraction from local bogs has been a drain on our carbon store - more than a billion tonnes in the island as a whole - and UCD's David Wilson will talk about this "death by a thousand cuts", as his paper calls it.
He is one of the scientists in the four-year Bogland project, led by UCD and funded by the Environment Protection Agency (EPA), that will produce this year "a protocol for the sustainable management of peatland in Ireland". Since its partners have included Bord na Móna, Coillte and Teagasc, as well as the National Parks and Wildlife Service, balancing biodiversity with all the other values will not have been easy. Some hints on the outcome should emerge at the Tullamore conference.
It's almost half a century since the future of Bord na Móna's cutaway was seen as offering land the size of Co Louth for "further productive use". Time showed, however, how little of it was economically suited to grassland, vegetable growing or forestry. The most successful treatment of the cutaway has been the Lough Boora Parklands, where large areas have been left to recolonisation by nature. Along with the eager growth of birch, Scots pine and orchids, and the resurgence of butterflies and nesting birds, there is room for human recreation - peacefully, as in birdwatching and angling in the new lakes, noisily as in model aeroplanes and a shooting range.
Creation of a far larger North Midlands Peatlands Park from cutaway bogs in Longford and Roscommon is a goal which has been brilliantly presented in a booklet by UCD's John Feehan, A Long-Lived Wilderness. It conjures a walker's paradise stretching some 40km from north to south along both banks of the Shannon. The plan has been promoted by a formidable lobby, urged on by the county councils. The proposers accept that the park could materialise only as Bord na Móna phases out its industrial operations, but want the planning started now.
They must have felt rebuffed last autumn by a Dáil response from the Minister for Natural Resources, Eamon Ryan: "I am advised that the lands in question are still being fully utilised by Bord na Móna for the harvesting of milled peat and will be for the foreseeable future." A bonus argument for the wilderness park is that the cutaway could become a valuable wetland to absorb Shannon flooding.
But a biofuel future is adding new thoughts on the future of cutaway - perhaps as land for miscanthus, the perennial "elephant grass". Even local lowland cutaway bogs might grow superwillow for community fuel projects.
Meanwhile, as oil soars, the phasing out of local turf-cutting from raised bogs in the midlands designated for conservation may have to contend with even higher bills for compensation.