Secrets of the dark bog

Sometimes, you have to be content with coming in on one of nature's little dramas half-way through. Why, exactly, was the raven chasing the merlin, half its size, across the morning sky? Perhaps with a hijack of prey in mind, perhaps just part of the long-standing aggro between ravens and falcons, the birds they would like to have been. I watched the crow give up, predictably, and recover its dignity in a brazen change of direction.

The thing was to be out and walking in the sun, somewhere that invited you to stretch your senses. Not, for once, the strand or its rocky hinterland, but a place oddly calm, quiet and forgotten within a few minutes of town. Turn off on a track towards the distant hills and any traffic fades quickly to a whisper behind the whins: ahead, the gentle hollow of Callacoon, the cutover bog that helped to fuel the town's hearths for centuries.

There are thousands of bogs like this all over Ireland: tracts of peatland carved into intricate bas-relief by entire communities and now largely abandoned but for a few "sausage" machines that browse the last useful levels in spring. Patterns of family ownership can be almost as blurred as the maze of banks and hollow-bogs glistening with threads of dark water. "Turbary" survives as a term in the latest Concise Oxford Dictionary ("The legal right to cut turf or peat for fuel on common ground") - how soon will eanit be offered multiple meanings on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

In these islands of scarred peatland, long undisturbed, too risky a terrain even for grazing sheep, a mosaic of vegetation reasserts itself, "natural" but not really authentic. As Atlantic blanket bog, Callacoon had a natural cover of moorgrass, Molinia, hummocked every few metres with bright cushions of moss.

Today, in a low winter sun, the dead flower stems of Molinia stand up from pale gold tussocks. Knee-high heather luxuriates at the dry and crumbling edges of the banks, together with thickets of bogmyrtle, each bud tight-wrapped in a tiny russet cone (crush them in your fingers for a hint of the shrub's spicy scent).

I have to imagine the summer drifts of bog-cotton, the bright brocade of sundew and bog asphodel, the shimmer of dragonfly wings. Now that nobody clears the deep drains and bog-holes between the banks, the uncut peat keeps its water, and reed buntings perch on invading willows. Seeds of lodgepole pine have blown in from the forestry nearby, generating lone green saplings here and there on drier peat.

What is to become of these man-made mini-wildernesses at the edge of small Irish towns? In many places (but not Callacoon) they are a convenient noman's-land for dead-of-night dumping of car-wrecks, rubble and refrigerators. Where this begins to happen almost any productive use must seem preferable - even yet more hectares of conifers, if the tangle of turbary rights allowed.

The great cutaway prairies of the midlands' raised bogs have been a test-bed for grand economic solutions: grassland, yes; vegetables no; forestry, when they find the right trees. One undoubted success has been the Lough Boora parklands in Co Offaly, where Bord na Mona has nobly flooded cutaway for new wetlands and left nature to recolonise bare peat - which it has done with an alacrity of orchids and birchwoods.

There is also the magical regeneration of plant-life (and thus of every other sort) at Killaun Bog, handed over to the care of St Brendan's Community School in Birr, whose students guard and study its wildlife. They maintain a boardwalk naturetrail that travels a maze of habitats: sphagnum swamp, woodland, bog pools, fens and heathlands, all within 30 hectares.

The spirit of such projects runs through the new Cutover and Cutaway Bogs Education Pack compiled with the help of 30 midlands teachers and published by the Irish Peatland Conservation Council. It is aimed at transition-year students, even those of uncertain enthusiasm. And while its focus is primarily the midlands' raised bogs, the chapters on wildlife will not be wasted on schools well west of the Shannon.

The idea of leaving the local cutover bog as an oasis for nature and education, or as "somewhere for the tourists to walk" is not that hard to argue. As small towns grow big, the bog road may take on quite an unforeseeable value as precious open space. Vegetation is likely to change as global warming dries out the higher peat levels: birch trees and pine will arrive by themselves, bracken, heather and gorse spread widely on what will then be heath rather than bog.

Now is the time for local action groups, gun clubs and incorrigibly altruistic schoolteachers to lay the foundations of community control of the abandoned cutover. It is part of local history and should also be part of a future that has come to see nature in a new and different way.

The cutover is a habitat - or rather, a complex of habitats, as the Killaun project shows. As such, it merits description in the new Guide to Habitats in Ireland published by the Heritage Council. This sets out a standard scheme for identifying, describing and classifying wildlife habitats in Ireland and is more a tool for environmental scientists and teachers than a book for the general reader.

Nonetheless, its text and photographs show what an extraordinary richness and variety of habitats are packed into one small island - half-a-dozen sorts of lake, half-a-dozen kinds of grassland, even half-a-dozen categories of mud. May this little book be used to make sure we keep them all.

The Guide to Habitats in Ireland is available from the IPCC, at 119 Capel Street, Dublin 1, at £13.30 (including postage and packing)