(Image: Erland Grøtberg/Gett)
A team went looking for bogs that bear witness to Britain’s great deforestation – but most were too young. What’s the path out of the quagmire?
WINNIE-THE-POOH’S friend Eeyore lived in a corner of the English countryside that will be familiar to anyone who has ever been walking in this part of the world. You decide to take a shortcut. The ground begins to get slightly soggy. Then very soggy. But you are a hardy hiker, and surely it’s not worth turning ba… squelch. One boot sinks deep enough to take on a sockful of slime. You may let out an Eeyoreish sigh.
But for some, the small bogs that dot the British countryside and many other damp landscapes are places to be sought out, not avoided. We’re not just talking about wildlife, although wetlands are havens for rare plants and animals. For scientists, bogs are a treasure trove of information. They preserve pollen and spores that open a window to the past going back many thousands of years.
Tony Brown is one of the researchers trying to open this window. A few years ago, his team began to search out bogs to take core samples from. It was a job that involved getting wet and muddy. And that wasn’t the only problem.
Brown wanted to study the great transition in the landscape that took place when forests were felled to make way for farmland. This process began about 5000 years ago, but it really got under way during the Bronze Age, which in Britain was from about 4500 to 2500 years ago. So the team wanted ...