Muckish mountain, or simply Muckish as it is more commonly known, An Mhucais in Irish, stands at 666 mts above sea level with its long flat top dominate the landscape across Donegal.
It is said to resemble a boar or pig when it is lying down and the Old Irish word muc means a 'pig' while the suffix ais is an ancient Pictish/Celtic ending associated with 'place' giving it the name Muckish. The land wrapped around its base gives one a sense of a desolate lonely place, covered with pine forests, mosses, heathers and stretches of bog land.
It is said to resemble a boar or pig when it is lying down and the Old Irish word muc means a 'pig' while the suffix ais is an ancient Pictish/Celtic ending associated with 'place' giving it the name Muckish. The land wrapped around its base gives one a sense of a desolate lonely place, covered with pine forests, mosses, heathers and stretches of bog land.
It is in this wild and gentle bogland that I spent some time with a second -generation turf cutter, who still cuts by hand over machine cutting, keeping alive a tradition handed down to him. He is the last Turf cutter that cuts by hand in his area.
We drive down wee ‘road’ to the deep cut furrows his past, the margins of mists and times gone by, bog pools and hummocks capped by heathers and different mosses with their great variation in their colours – green, orange, red and brown. Raised boglands are part of the world’s oldest living, near-natural eco-systems, dating back almost 10,000 years.
In the wetter parts, white-beaked sedge, bog asphodel, cotton grasses and other rare plants grow, with bog beans and bladderworts growing in pools. Bog rosemary and cranberry, with its bright red, sharp-tasting berries are found creeping through Sphagnum carpets and sundews too dominate all around. Lichens – Ireland’s own Coral Reef – occur in patches.
On arrival at his patch of bog I learn, there is the humour of the bog, a camaraderie between the dark ditches and this was evident in the first thing we see steeping out of the car.
An office chair with an old leather jacket slung over its back, laughing Trevor tells me it’s because he is behind in cutting his turf, they are telling him “to get of his ass, get the coat off and get on with it’ he say with deep belly laugh.
Where it came from? Who put it there? He shrugs 'a don’t know'
Across the soft ground marching to the peatlands with the spade-like tools slung over his shoulders, he’s explaining into the soft breeze, how each tool is unique and that each cutter had his own individual tool, crafted from pliable wood such as ash or sally, that held a blade made from scrap metal. The dark black sullen realms of spongy sphagnum mire that vacillate between solid and liquid were labelled bogach, meaning soft, which gives us the modern English word “bog”; while the long ridges of post-glacial gravel that rose above the bogs, they called eiscir, giving us the modern term esker today.
Trevor showed me the first step in cutting turf, the 'clearing', which involved removing the upper living layers of stems and roots called heathy scraw (from the Irish word scraith, meaning a green sod) using the flatcher.
He cast it aside in previous cut land. “It’ll root itself and keep growing so not damaging the plants on the bog” he explains. Next the weakly humified material underneath the scraw was also removed and used to provide a firm surface on the cutover.
We rise and stand upon the on top of the bank and with the slane , he slices through the sods, cut on two sides with one downward vertical stroke of the winged slane; the bottom of the sod is broken-up while raising it with the slane.
The sod is then tossed to the bank to dry out. Its wet, dark, rich, solidness lays silently on the dry purple heather casting vivid contrasts. The damp earthy smell rises and gently fills your nose, a scent like no other, as it draws its first breath of air in thousands of years.
There’s a gentle rhythm to the art of using the slane, after a few practice try's I find it. It’s like meditation and you stop thinking about the doing and are just carried with the rhythm of each cut and toss, and you look back and the rows of the dark turf slices laid out for drying.
Breaking for tea, the turf fire has been lit in the hallows of a previous bank, an old used teapot put on to boil and sandwiches shared from a biscuit tin, the air, filled with smelled of turf smoke.
“Once, a while ago you’d see turf fires burning in every patch of bog, as families all worked alongside each other, he tells me, but the machine cutting has taken away a lot of that now. He recalled his first visit to the bog with his father and being taught all the wisdom from generations before.
The break doesn’t last long as the turning of the turf was next. This is where sods cut weeks before and where staked in clumps that spread out like mole hills among the grasses and heathers, ready to be gathered in when natures elements have worked on the once dark wet rooted clumps to transform them to light, hard solid lumps waiting to be bagged up in old fertiliser bags.
We began the turning and the gathering of the turf that was ready to come home.As the sun sets and the breeze softens, tufts of white cotton softly sway against the blackness of newly cut ditches and bags of ancient dried earth are loaded to take home.
There is no one around only spirits of the past.
I can’t recommend a day in the bog enough, I was spared the dreaded midges, the fires helps, but nothing like working up an appetite working on the land and laughing till your sides hurt .I’ve learned there is an extensive and specialised Irish vocabulary evolved around the cutting of turf, and each part of the country had its own variants or `turf dialects'.
Some of the terminology connected with turf cutting in Ireland,the western isles of Scotland, and of Norse origin.
A turf bank in Scottish Gaelic is called bac mona (bakki = bank in Old Norse), a turf spade, a treisgeir, which is simply the Old Norse word torf-sceir, a turf cutter.
Droim ~, bank for turf-spreading.
~ mhóna, armful of turf.
~ mhóna, chipíní, armful of turf, of sticks.
Móin a bhaigeadh, to put turf in small heaps, bagfuls.
Móin, fód, a bhaint, to cut turf, a sod.
~ mhóna, phrátaí, heap of turf, of potatoes.
Móin bhaitíneach, stringy turf.
~ coirce, prátaí, móna, crop of oats, of potatoes, of turf.
~ fód, layer of sods (in turf bank).
6. ~ sleáin, wing, flange, of turf-spade.
~ móna, bank of turf (prepared for cutting).
~ móna, portaigh, sodden, poor-quality, turf, bog.
2. ~ mhóna, éisc, handful of turf, of fish.
~ móna, cut turf spread on bog.
~ móna, turf-bank.
~ móna, crumbled turf.
~ móna, turf mould.
Móin a cheapadh, to mould turf (in sods).
Móin chipíneach, woody, fibrous, turf.
~ mhóna, crate of turf.
3. ~í poirt, thin, flattened, sods of turf.
~ móna, clamp of turf.
~ mhóna, heap of footed turf.
~ mhóna, bank of turf.
~ mhóna, stack, clamp, of turf.
~ meitheal ar do chuid móna, get a working party to cut your turf for you.
~ móna, clod of turf.
~ móna, ola, turf-, oil-, burning.
Chomh ~ le móin, le féar, le gaineamh na trá, as plentiful as turf, as grass, as the sand on the sea-shore.
~ móna, pannier (-load) of turf.
Móin fhliuch, wet, spongy, turf.
~ talún, móna, sod of ground, of turf.
Port, bachta, ocht bh~, bank (of turf) eight sods in depth.
