Shropshire Magazine

Attractive cotton sedge at the mosses.

‘In wilderness is the preservation of the world,’ wrote Henry David Thoreau. As Gareth Wheatley explains, such wilderness is closer to home than you might think . . .

They might come in every size and shape, but we all know the world’s wild places. They can excite, frighten, inspire, or make us glad we live thousands of miles away.

They’re the rocks and ravines of forbidding dark mountains or steamy dense jungles where horrors hide behind every tree and the humid air is filled with the stench of things we’d rather not think about. They’re the dust-dry river beds at the back of beyond, or uninhabited islands on the edge of the Antarctic where vertical cliffs are battered by the relentless angry waves of vast southern oceans.

The adventurous go there to test themselves; the active rich drop in for a few days before making their next million; gap-year students tick them off their list; and ageing hippies hope to learn the secrets of eternal youth by living in them rent-free. The rest of us will probably only know them through television.

You must have seen the programmes — they’re usually on a Sunday night, an hour’s journey through the most remote landscapes on earth seen from the safety of your sofa.

But wild places are not always where they should be; some are much closer than we think, because any visitor, with even the tiniest bit of imagination, can listen to the wind combing the low-lying vegetation of the Fenn’s, Whixall and Bettisfield Mosses that lie across the Welsh-English border, and get the odd feeling of being in the middle of somewhere remote, something that might even be called . . . a wilderness.

This raised peat bog, its centre a national nature reserve, might be only a few miles away from the bustling towns of Wrexham and Whitchurch, but for too many people is as little known as the dark side of the moon. Research suggests that most visitors enjoy the experience, even those like me who find it a strangely unsettling place where there seem to be no boundaries, nothing definite to head towards, nothing definite to leave behind.

A celebrated poet and passionate advocate of the area’s charms, Gladys Mary Coles, had described the mosses as a ‘Kingdom of Sphagnum where space and time interweave.’

Before I visited the ‘Kingdom’ I’d been puzzled by the words, but an hour after entering the reserve I was beginning to understand.

Dr Joan Daniels.

And it’s not just artists who have passions about the place. On my second visit I spoke to Dr Joan Daniels from Natural England, the reserve’s senior site manager. Together with other scientists, her estate staff, contractors and volunteers, she has worked for nearly two decades to help bring about the restoration of a wilderness whose very existence was once threatened by large-scale commercial peat cutting.

What drives them? Any number of reasons, but it seems likely that most share Thoreau’s belief that ‘in wilderness is the preservation of the world.’

I was told that these rain-fed raised bogs help counteract global warming and provide a range of sometimes unique habitats for flora and fauna, many with names as exotic as any found in faraway lands. But don’t take my word for it; make up your own mind.

Within 20 minutes of pizzas and pavements, a visitor can find insect-eating plants, water voles, common lizards, raft spiders the size of the palm of your hand, green sandpiper, spotted redshank, yellowhammer, and Britain’s only poisonous snake. You can see buzzards slowly circling overhead like an image from a cowboy film shot in the middle of the American West. But these buzzards fly over Shropshire and Wales, not Sonora or Wyoming.

Mystery

Many of the invertebrates add yet more colour and mystery — purple-bordered gold moth, black darter, dingy mocha, four-spot chaser and the emerald damselfly. See what I mean?

Innovative conservation techniques have helped the two bodies responsible for the restoration of the near-1,000-hectare reserve, the Countryside Council for Wales and Natural England, restore moss to the mosses. Once commercial peat cutting had been halted in 1990, work could begin on such tasks as clearing birch or pine scrub and forests, and re-establishing the correct water tables by appropriate damming of drains. These techniques have brought about massive gains in an impressively short time for the first badly damaged raised peat bog in the country to be saved on this scale.

Unlike those who plant trees which will only be seen in their full maturity by generations yet to be born, working in wetlands can mean that in less than three years you can get not just the return of a primitive bog but, as peat is a huge carbon store, help with reducing the worst effects of climate change.

One sunny, fresh morning, while fitful winds tugged at ground-hugging plants, I walked along a peaty path listening to the calls of thousands of birds attracted by the lagoons that dot the place and felt reassured by the efforts being made to preserve this precious, peaceful place.

But peace hasn’t always been associated with the area. Any research into the history of the mosses suggests that, through the centuries, the place has seen its share of argument and bloodshed through conflicts driven by tribal loyalties, the need to eke out a bare living, the opportunities for commercial gain, and its use to support the national effort in two world wars.

The second half of the 19th century saw the discovery of three ‘bog bodies’, all remarkably well preserved thanks to the pickling action of their extremely acidic peat-based surroundings. The bodies were subsequently reinterred, one in Whixall churchyard and the other two in Whitchurch, thus making modern forensic examination impossible as the result of the decay of organic tissue. As well as the bodies, a palstave, or Bronze Age axe-head was found quite close to one of the bodies by a worker hand-cutting ‘Whixall bibles’, the local name given to small, rectangular blocks of peat.

How did they die? No one really knows, although experts seem to hold a range of conflicting opinions, including a belief that the three might have been victims of ritual sacrifice either to propitiate the gods or to help deter unknown enemies.

When did they die? Again there’s a degree of uncertainty, but one of the trio is thought to have lived over 3,000 years ago during the Bronze Age, with the other two being more likely to have come from the Iron Age or Romano-British period. Although some might prefer, hard, cold facts, this tantalising lack of definitive information about the three buried in the reserve’s rich, dark peat, on tribal boundaries between England and Wales, helps reinforce the mystery of the mosses.

Perhaps aggression is part of the human condition, because conflict in one form or another has shaped the history and appearance of this fascinating wild place. In the First World War, thousands of soldiers, most of them from nearby army camps, spent time on one of the rifle ranges built on Fenn’s and Whixall Mosses. But these days a visitor sees a very different sight. Over the years galleries and butts have sunk slowly into the surrounding peat or been partly covered by purple moor-grass or birch scrub, and a few of those visitors might find something uplifting about seeing the straight lines and precise angles of man-made structures being warped or hidden by nature reclaiming its territory.

World War II saw the north end of the mosses being used as a practice bombing range, but the area’s contribution to the national effort didn’t end there. In an attempt to deceive the Luftwaffe, a decoy dummy ‘town’ was created in the hope of confusing enemy bomber crews and luring them away from ‘real’ targets along the Mersey estuary. Apparently all this clandestine activity did nothing to help relationships between the Air Ministry and local peat cutters working in what was a reserved occupation.

It’s a wilderness that needs respect from careful visitors, yet it’s worth remembering that peat has been dug here since medieval times and used for fuel, as a building material for some of the cottages that once dotted the area, or bedding for their horses, pigs and chickens.

Peatmen who worked the land developed not just the tools they used, but a vocabulary as well. The fact that an outsider wouldn’t understand most of the everyday terms needed for the job, like ‘fettling’, ‘maws’, ‘nog’, ‘pattens’ and ‘stych’, perhaps adds to the feeling that the mosses are special places isolated not just by their position, but by the characteristics of the people who live here.

Nowadays many of us live lives pressured by timetables and cluttered by products sold to us by cunning advertisers who have persuaded us that we really do need them. Recognising this pressure is one thing, doing something about it is quite another. But don’t worry, a possible solution is nearer than you think. Try strolling around a wilderness, looking at the subtle interplay of colour and light while listening to the sounds of birds and cotton sedge brushed by winds, and you too might feel the inner calm that I felt that sunny morning when I walked the peaty paths of the mosses trails.

• To find out more visit www.naturalengland.org.uk

Some of the many varieties of moss.