Emergence

Published monthly on unlimitedrag.com, Terrestrial Tales seeks the stories of not only the hunters, emperors and battles, but the gatherers, the seeds, the birds, the ways of water…. In the series’ third piece, Dougal Kirkland traces the fragile relationship between humans, nature, and time through bodies preserved in peat bogs

Words: Dougal Kirkland 

Emlyn Bainbridge and Dougal Kirkland, Untitled, Video still

I think you knew this landscape well. Did you move amongst the hummocks with the light footed cunning of a fox? Fox manwoman. Shapeshifter. Ancestor. Walker between worlds, who are you? 

Only the contrail overhead belies modernity. And the turbine. Everything else about this landscape feels timeless and quietly resistant. In a bog the onward path is unclear. There is a squelch underfoot. Is it land or water? Or something in-between?  In-betweenness is important. Lurking at the fringes of human society, bogs are thin places. Boggarts dwell here. Spectral dogs and Púcas too. A vegetal guff ignites and then combusts: the illusive ignis fatuus. There is something uncanny about these landscapes that swell on top of hills and nestle in damp hollows. A bog liquidises binaries. It’s about hidden worlds. It’s about slowing time. Past meeting future. Marginality. Liminality. 

Lurking between tufts of rattling cottongrass and sponges of green sphagnum lie deep and murky pools. Noodle soup. Clouds skim across glassy surfaces. A bubble belches from the depths. A carnivorous sundew catches an insect in its tendrils. This is a blanket woven of mosses, delicate flowers, heathers, common ling and cranberry. They say the memory of a footstep can last for years in a bog’s moist pith. Concealed below its exuberant crust, the sodden peaty underworld.

When their machinery dredged you up, scraped you like icing from a Guinness cake, what were you then? Stretched out and sleeping between layers of laden turf. Marinading for 2000 years, are you more bog than human now? Your manicured nail slices through centuries, its blackened finger pushing between the lacy veils of eons. Epoch straddler. Time traveller. 

Peat is the substance of your underworld. 

Peat, that gradually forming, self-perpetuating sludge that thrives where wetness lingers. Only certain flora survives where peat accumulates. Sphagnum. Absorbent and spongelike sphagnum moss may be responsible for more carbon incorporation than any other genus of plant. The recipe for peat is water, sphagnum and any other organic matter that finds itself gulped in. This is a landscape that slowly digests itself. Inside there is no oxygen, thus objects swallowed here become petrified, suspended in deep time. No bacteria. No worms. An organic time capsule, this land archives all that it eats. 

Left: Dougal Kirkland, Flow Country, Monotype, Carborundum and chine collé, 2024

Right: Dougal Kirkland, Bog Cotton, Oil and soft pastel. 77x57cm, 2023

When you sank through the threshold you were 27 or there about. Over the centuries it grew up around you. How did you end up here and why? I trace the warped topography of your body with a pencil on my page. The intimacy of your leather skin. The follicles of hair that bristle at your jaw and the once peat-slicked fox pelt bracelet you wear on your left arm. The animal cord that twists around your throat is like barbed wire sunken into the rind of a tree.

Now you lie naked; the exhibitionist. Your sleeping face reflected in gawping mouths, fingertips pressed against glass. The land you were is smaller now and thirsty. But there are efforts to make it wet again. Displaced and rehoused, there could be no returning to the ground you became. You kept your ginger hair neatly trimmed - yours is a well groomed appearance. Time and peat will degrade plant fibres like nettle and flax but wool and leather survive, sometimes. And the bog tans skin like hyde. I wonder, what did you like to wear?

I picture you in a yellow dress;

• Bog Myrtle: Dyes yarn a bright, fine yellow and also drives away the midges. 

• Bog Asphodel: Dyes yarn and tints hair yellow, also known as maidenhair.  It can be used as a substitute for saffron. 

• Marsh Marigold: Blooms in late April. Dyes fibres a yellow-green and doesn’t require a mordant. 

In an ancient context, production of clothing was a valuable and time consuming process. Many hours and hands to rear the animals, to spin and dye the yarn, to weave the dress. Dye again, reuse, repair. Garments like these are precious. Had you been wearing a dress we may never know, but others like you did.  

There were others like you, yes:

Yde 

Grauballe 

Tollund

Elling

Gallagh 

It is said that lightning won’t strike the home that hangs mistletoe. This sacred plant goes by many names: Kiss and go, golden bough, birdlime, churchman’s greeting, devil’s fugue. The Greeks once referred to it as ‘Oak Sperm’ - its sticky white berries reminiscent of semen. Associated with fertility rebirth and vitality, it was the plant most favoured by druids.

It was a day in early spring when you ate your last meal of bread and mistletoe. Emmer, spelt wheat and hulled barley, baked. No gruel for the likes of you. An insect moves through the cottongrass. In the eastern sky the morning star still shimmers above the treeline. Oak, birch, alder, pine and elm skeletons against the pale dawn. Mistletoe in branches. The weather cold and new life around you yet unfurling. A blow to the head, garrotted, sliced, a broken neck. No moss dressing would quell the flow from your gashed throat. Your spilling blood seeps into peat. 

110 Miles north as the crow flies is Weerdinge, the Netherlands. Lovers buried in Bourtanger Moor. Laid down with care these men would sleep arm in arm for 2000 years. Mr and Mr Veenstra. A rapturous puncture to the chest from which the steaming guts were pulled. And from the gore a future divined, a seers last libation. 20 centuries later a nazi leader would usurp their history. He said: “Homosexuals known as Urnings were drowned in swamps. This was not punishment, it was simply getting rid of something immoral”.

Dougal Kirkland, The Gundestrup Cauldron, Graphite on paper. 59x84cm, 2025

450 Miles North East of Weerdindge in northern Jutland, Denmark, is a peat bog called Rævemose. Subsumed here for two millennia was a ceremonial treasure deconstructed. Precious panels neatly stacked. Crafted by the Thracians and depicting Celtic imagery, this cauldron's voyage began in southeastern Europe and ended in a Danish bog. An offering to the sacred land. Tracing constellations the Gundestrup cauldron is at once a luminary map and a ritual vessel. It is adorned with many faces - the great mother and the master of dance to name a few. Inside an antlered figure communes with animals. A second torque and a third sex. Animal hybrids. On one panel is a man riding upon a fish. These in-between cultures adhere to their own mythic laws. Images in silver of deities and cultic rites. A sacrifice. Dagda calls to fallen warriors from the land of the dead.

It was a threefold death for you the seer. A ritual. You always were the special one. The Ambassador. It was brutal and extravagant, but it was mercifully quick. Unbounded, you already had one foot in their realm. Did you appeal to your gods about the invaders? And did the crops blossom from your memory? 

The turbine's swoop cuts the air, its sprawling veins extend outwards through peat. Deep below the surface they are thrumming. Above ground a golden plover darts across a bog pool. Charred gorse ragged at the fringes. The sky is red. 

What could be more befitting for you than to belong to the bog. A landscape that understands you in its ambiguity. And yet here we are peering in at you from a dark corner of room 50. Here you lay intimate and unknowable: the dreamer with a furrowed brow. Is this how you imagined the afterlife? I think of your people, your identity and the land. I think of votive offerings and notions of give and receive. All that was carried with you into peat. And now, here you are again, emerging in a strange new time.