The Magic of Wetlands - From the Carboniferous to Carbon Sinks
I. Dreaming the Carboniferous
Horsetail
I pull it out.
It pulls me down,
clinging to the contrary
mare’s dock to a swamp where
it grows tree tall.
A helicopter lies
crashed like a dragonfly,
multicoloured wires hanging out,
propeller spinning, four diaphanous
wings folded, broken,
like a child’s toy.
Its imprint is like a fossil.
Toy soldiers
with tiny guns gather round.
They flee when they smell
the burning petrol.
The earth dreams deeply. She speaks to us her dreams. She speaks to us her visions. She is 4.543 billion years old (by our reckoning). We hominids have been around, in this form, for only 2 million years.
Over the last 250 years we have vastly transformed our planet by mining carbon in the form of coal, oil, and gas from beneath her surface to provide power for the factories, shops, offices, houses, and vehicles of industrialised society, bringing about the changes in climate are likely to bring about its end.
This carbon, which we have so quickly and haphazardly squandered, was laid down during what we refer to here in Britain as the Carboniferous period (1) which ‘lasted around 73 million years from 363 to 290 Ma’. At this time Britain lay on the equator and sea levels had risen world-wide.
Firstly, the seas deposited Carboniferous limestone made up of the shells of millions of sea creatures such as brachiopods and crinoids, whose fossils can be seen today. When the seas shallowed, shale was laid down. The seas were invaded by river deltas, depositing sand to form sandstones.
The deltas then began to support swamps and vegetation developed with increasing size and prolificity: club mosses, seed ferns, giant horse tails 20 m tall with 60 cm trunks and great trees known as lycophytes 30 m high with 1.5 m trunks. Through the process of photosynthesis the trees and plants removed carbon from the atmosphere, replacing it with oxygen. When they died their remains decayed and were buried, meaning the carbon within them was transferred to the soil.
The large amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere led to the gigantism of insects and amphibians. These included dragonflies the size of seagulls with 2.5 foot wing spans, centipedes six foot long and predators resembling crocodiles with thick, scaly skins and vicious teeth up to twenty feet in length.
The seas inundated the swamps and these cyclothems repeated hundreds of times, leaving layers of sediment. The carboniferous was brought to an end by global cooling caused by the removal of carbon from the atmosphere in a minor extinction event known as ‘the Carboniferous rainforest collapse’.
These magical geological processes provided the bedrock of the industrial revolution. Here, in Lancashire, where it began (2), the sandstone, most famously Millstone Grit, built the dark Satanic mills. The coal, up to 1500 m thick in some of the coalfields, powered the factories. Attempts have been made to extract shale gas from the shale by fracking, but have been abandoned due to earthquakes.
A good part of a geological age has been dug from the depths of the earth. Is it any wonder she speaks to us of the Carboniferous in broken dreams and calls our attention to our existing wetlands?
II. The Diversity of Wetlands
Since the Carboniferous, wetlands have continued to act as essential parts of the earth’s ecosystem. As liminal zones between earth and water they are constantly shifting, changing, with the tides, with their own natural processes of succession, and, of course, with the changing climate of our planet.
After the last Ice Age, when the glaciers thawed, the sea levels rose, and the rivers began to flow, marshlands and reed beds developed in river estuaries and peat bogs in glacial depressions.
Each wetland forms a valuable ecosystem in its own right. A marsh is a wetland that is characterised by marsh grasses, is either permanently or periodically flooded, and remains wet at all times. Salt marshes and intertidal marshes are found on coasts and estuaries. The marshlands of the Ribble estuary in Lancashire are covered by salt marsh grass and red rescue and its rich invertebrate fauna provide food for breeding waterbirds such as common tern and overwintering waterbirds such as black-tailed godwit, dunlin, knot, widgeon, teal, pink-footed geese, and Bewick’s and whooper swans.
Freshwater wetlands include wet meadows, reed beds, wet woodlands, and peat bogs. Wet meadows are characterised by wetland plant species such as sedges, rushes, grasses, marsh marigold, and yellow flag iris and are homes to numerous dragonflies, darters, leafhoppers, ground beetles, and spiders. There are many examples in my local area including Well Field in Penwortham.
Reed beds are composed mainly of common reed and provide essential habitat for birds such as reed bunting, reed warbler, and the bittern, a shy endangered heron, who hides in the reeds, and has a unique booming call. Bitterns have been sighted in reed beds at Brockholes Nature Reserve.
Wet woodlands, or carr woodlands, are dominated by alder and willow. The iconic willow tit excavates its nest in dead willows, thus willow scrub is essential for its survival. This red-listed bird is actually on the increase here in Lancashire, where I’ve seen and heard it in several wet woods.
Lancashire’s extensive peatlands formed during the climatic deterioration event at the beginning of the Iron Age when the climate became colder and wetter and the peat swallowed much of the oak forest. We know of this from the trunks of old bog oaks, known as ‘moss stocks’, recovered from farmer’s fields.
Peat bogs (or mosslands as they are known here) are composed of living and decaying sphagnum mosses. As the sphagnum rots down and compacts it forms peat. Other plant species include the carnivorous round-leaved sun-dew, bell heather, cross-leafed heath and hare’s tail cottongrass. The latter is a vital food source for the rare large heath butterfly, known locally as the Manchester Argus.
Wetlands naturally exist in a state of succession. As vegetation grows and dies it builds up, making the area drier, leading to colonisation by trees and the replacement of wetland by woodland. In periods of wet weather and during inundation events the water returns and the cycle begins again.
III. Wetland Spirits
After the Ice Age, when humans returned to Britain, they treated wetlands with reverence and respect. That they viewed them as inspirited and as places of communion with gods and ancestors is evidenced by ritual depositions of weapons, jewellery, coins, and burials of bog bodies and severed heads.
This suggests the deities and spirits, like the wetlands they inhabited, were viewed as both nurturing and life-giving and death-dealing and treacherous, and were feared and revered by the ancient Britons.
During the Christian period they were demonised. This is reflected by the popularity of the Old English poem, Beowulf, which originated from Scandinavia, amongst the Anglo-Saxons of the East Anglian fens. The hero, Beowulf battles against Grendel, a ‘dark death shadow / who lurked and swooped in the long nights / on the misty moors’ and his mother a ‘monstrous hell-bride’, a ‘hell-dam’, a ‘swamp thing from hell’, ‘a tarn-hag in all her terrible strength’, a ‘she-wolf’, and ‘wolf of the deep’.
In Britain there is a long tradition of associations between marshlands and disease and death. Maelgwn, King of Gwynedd, died after seeing ‘a most strange creature’ ‘His hair, his teeth, and his eyes being as gold’ ‘from the sea marsh of Rhianedd’ - the spirit of Y Vat Velen ‘the Yellow Plague’.
Malaria, once known as ague, was carried by mosquitoes, who bred in marshlands. This birthed a history of lore from stories about Yr Hen Wrach ‘The Old Hag’ of Cors Fochno, Borth Bog, a seven-foot grey woman who visited people in their beds and caused them to wake with the shakes, to lines from Coleridge: ‘Ague, the biform Hag! When early Spring / Beams on the marsh bred-vapours.’
Pre-Christian beliefs about the spirits of wetlands live on in Lancashire’s rich boggart lore. These malevolent spirits haunted the bogs, then later the farmhouses, after the land was drained. Some merely caused mischief, scaring children with their penny-whistle like voices, breaking pots and pans or curdling milk, but others made livestock lame or ill and even killed animals and humans.
IV. Draining the Wetlands
Beginning in the 16th century negative perceptions of wetlands as inhospitable and unproductive joined with the desire for more land for farming, and the ambitions of engineers, led to their draining.
Such attitudes might be summarised by Daniel Defoe writing of Chat Moss in 1720:
‘This surface, at a distance, looks black and dirty, and is indeed frightful to think of, will bear neither horse nor man, unless in an exceedingly dry season, and then not so as to be passable, or that anyone should travel over them. What nature meant by such useless production ‘tis hard to imagine...’
One of the projects with the greatest impact in Lancashire was the draining of ‘the Region Linuis’, ‘the Lake Region’, including its deep heart, Martin Mere, England’s largest lake at twenty miles in diameter, and the surrounding marshlands. Between 1694 and 1694 Thomas Fleetwood employed 2,000 workers to dig the 1.5 mile channel known as the Sluice to the coast at Crossens. The drained land, reclaimed for farming, flooded repeatedly until the installation of the pumping station at Crossens in 1961.
All that remains of Martin Mere are the small fragments at the nature reserves WWT Martin Mere and LWT Mere Sands Wood along with place names such as Mere End, Mere Brow, and Holmeswood (3). Countless smaller meres in the region such as Shoricar’s Mere, Renacres Mere, Gettern Mere, and Barton Mere were also drained. Further north Marton Mere was drained by Main Dyke.
The draining of Penwortham Marsh, in my home town, is recorded by the field names in surveys and on maps. A survey of the Farington estates from 1570 refers to the Corn Marsh of 28 ½ acres and Little Burgess Marsh. In 1725 the Corn Marsh was renamed Pasture Marsh showing it was used for grazing instead. The name Cow Gate Marsh is also suggestive of use for pasturage. Other field names include Innes Marsh, Little Marsh, Middle Marsh, New Marsh, and Long Marsh. The small strips that remained as intertidal marshland beside the Ribble were called Out Marsh and Great Marsh.
Penwortham Moss, ‘a moss and waste within Penwortham’ ‘so large’ ‘only a comparatively narrow belt of land was suitable for arable agriculture’ was destroyed by peat digging and draining. It was used as a turbary since the 13th century and legal disputes over the 100 acres of Brounhyll and Helleholes, which once lay just down the road from me, are recorded in the mid-16th century. Its enclosure and drainage followed and by the time of the Tithe Map in 1840 nothing of the moss remained.
The surrounding mosses of Charnock and Farington were drained. To the north Pilling Moss, Cockerham Moss, and Winmarleigh Moss and to the south Chat Moss, Risley Moss, Highfield Moss, Astley Moss and countless other mosslands of Lancashire and beyond met the same fate.
V. Wetland Reserves and Carbon Sinks
Attitudes towards wetlands have begun to change a result of the environmental movement. Rooted in the Romantic period, it began to gain pace in the 1940s. Its ethic might be summarised by Aldo Leopold’s imperative, stated in 1949, of preserving the ‘beauty, integrity, and health of natural systems.’
The first wetland nature reserve in Britain was the Wildfowl and Wetland centre at Slimbridge, founded by Peter Scott in 1946. The WWT now have 9 reserves and other organisations such as the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts have created wetland reserves across the country. Some are on drained land that has been returned to its natural state, such as RSPB Hesketh Out Marsh, and others are on former industrial sites, such as the Lancashire Wildlife Trust’s Brockholes, on a former sand quarry.
The Ramsar Convention, The Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, adopted its terms of agreement in Ramsar, in Iran, in 1971. Its aim is ‘The conservation and wise use of all wetlands through local and national actions and international cooperation, as a contribution towards achieving sustainable development throughout the world.’ The Ribble and Alt estuaries, Martin Mere, and Leighton Moss are recognised as Ramsar sites ‘of importance in conserving biological diversity’.
Since the Kyoto Treaty of 1992 there has been a growing recognition of the importance of wetlands as ‘carbon sinks’. This term refers to the magical process by which wetland vegetation removes carbon from the atmosphere and its remnants are buried, sunk into the earth, until they are released.
This has led to the restoration of wetlands on a far greater scale as more funding has become available. Locally the Lancashire Wildlife Trust have been working with Care-Peat, an Interreg funded EU project, Manchester Metropolitan University and Beadamoss, to set up a ‘ground breaking carbon farm’ on Winmarleigh Moss for the purpose of capturing carbon to stall climate change.
LWT’s mossland restoration work is ongoing in other areas. For example Chat Moss, Highfield Moss, and other mosslands have been rewetted and planted with hare’s tail cottongrass and cross-leafed heath as food plants for the large heath butterfly, which is being reintroduced across these sites.
These are all fantastic steps forward. However, I can’t help but feel saddened by the fact that governments have only begun to acknowledge that wetlands are valuable insofar as they are carbon sinks and might be able to mitigate climate change, thus saving human lives. That, for those in power, its always about us, humans, and not about the intrinsic value of the ecosystems we depend on.
This is a consequence of our loss of the worldview of nature as inspirited through centuries of Christianity and, more recently, the hegemony of scientific rationalism and technological capitalism.
The view that nature is not only intrinsically valuable but alive filled with spirits is steadily reviving within both the Pagan and environmental movements. For example, at Risley Moss Nature Reserve, there is a boggart trail and earth goddess sculpture, and it hosts a ‘Boggarty Boggart Day’. Other nature reserves have employed artists to create sculptures of local creatures and tree and nature spirits.
As our wetlands are restored the spirits begin to speak again, to appear in our artworks, in our stories. We sense magic at work and catch glimpses of enchantment. These places are not for us and may not save us but they can show us what it means to be part of a greater more magical whole.
FOOTNOTES
(1) ‘Carboniferous’ was a name coined by Conyberare and Phillips in 1822 to refer to coal-bearing strata in Britain. In North America geologists use time periods – the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian.
(2) Richard Arkwright, the father of the industrial revolution, built his first spinning frame on Stoneygate, Preston, Lancashire.
(3) ‘Holme’ means ‘island’ and is an Old English word derived from Old Norse holmr.
SOURCES
Alan Crosby, Penwortham in the Past, (1988, Carnegie Publishing)
Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, (Penguin, 1971)
‘Carboniferous Period’, National Geographic.
‘Pioneering Winmarleigh carbon farm is fighting climate change’, Lancashire Wildlife Trust.
‘Ribble and Alt Estuaries’, ‘Information Sheet on Ramsar Estuaries’, Ramsar, (2005).
LORNA SMITHERS
Lorna Smithers is a poet, author, awenydd, Brythonic polytheist, and devotee of Gwyn ap Nudd. She has published three books: Enchanting the Shadowlands, The Broken Cauldron, and Gatherer of Souls. Based in Penwortham, Lancashire, northwest England, she volunteers for the Lancashire Wildlife Trust and is learning to grow small things and listen to the land. She blogs at From Peneverdant.