We don't have any peat on Graemsay though there are many peat beds around Orkney. I think in times past the islanders may have had peat rights on Hoy but that is lost in the mists of time. So I know very little about the process. However my camera guru, Derek Mayes, has recently started the annual
peat cut and kindly offered to write about it to educate us all! Here's his first entry......
From Derek....
…Each year, at about this time in
mid to late April, I begin to open up my peat beds. I do not own the peat nor the
land but our house-deeds allow for extraction, for personal use, any amount of
peat from the nearby headland.
April 22nd. Always the
toughest day – the first. Cool breezes, the chance of a shower and with limbs
and muscles weak after a winter of passive exercise!
I take the spade on the
five-minute walk from the house to
the ancient beds. I am the only one
who cuts here but the beds, whole headland really, have been used by the whole
community for a couple of centuries I guess. The evidence is easy to spot,
overhanging walls of old cuttings, standing water along the foot of many, track-ways and damaged ground.
Over the years, extraction has
probably lowered most of the headland
by the height of a person. In many places the peat has been removed all the way
to the underlying rock and sandy drift.
Cutting has to be done
methodically as the top turfs need to be placed back on the ground, repairing as
one extracts and progresses. There’s good evidence for careless extraction and
so I have undertaken, over my
eleven years, to repair areas where my predecessors have been
careless.
The faces are hard and cracked
after 10 months of wind, rain and fierce sunshine. The outer exposed faces are
like concrete and cannot easily be cut from the face itself, only from
above..
So the first task is to remove
the top, heathery blanket. A long portion (two spades wide) atop the bed is
stripped and the turfs laid onto the ground behind me – there is about a metre
of bare ground from the peat face to the vegetation. This would allow a
wheelbarrow - in the old days a
pony - to progress along the beds
It is backbreaking and I can only
manage an hour. The topmost peat, (under the rough turf) is very fibrous and
dry, containing the oldest roots of the heather and other heathland plants. This
lightweight peat is called the Greenback (I call them fluffies - because they are!). It is very hard to get
the spade through, because of the fibrous nature, so only the sharpest, flattest
spade will do.
These are quick drying peats, so
I can make them into quite big piles for the wind and sun to do their bit. It’ll take me three or four visits to
get down to the Tusker peat – lovely, black, pastry-like structure. After two
one-hour visits I now have three piles
like the one seen in the photo above.. The roman numeral is 22 – 22nd April.
More from Derek soon....
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