Qualla: Bellanagare Bog https://qualla.com/bellanagare-bog en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:12 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/d/4/bellanagare-bog-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Bellanagare Bog https://qualla.com/bellanagare-bog Bellanagare Bog: Introduction https://qualla.com/bellanagare-bog/ Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. From a passing airliner the surface looks like nothing - a brown-russet smudge in the patchwork of Roscommon fields, indistinguishable from the rough grazing around it. From the ground, on a wet October morning, the same surface springs gently underfoot, the way a deep mattress springs. Step off the path and you sink to the ankle in living sphagnum, the moss that built this place one millimetre at a time since the end of the last ice age. Bellanagare Bog is one of Ireland's classic raised bogs - a 1,203-hectare dome of accumulated peat just west of the village of Bellanagare, near Castlerea. Most of Europe's raised bogs are gone, drained or cut for fuel or buried under conifer plantations. This one, listed as a priority habitat under the EU Habitats Directive, is part of what remains - and the fight to keep it alive is one of the more complicated stories in modern Irish conservation.

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/d/4/bellanagare-bog-wp/gcd4-bellanagare-bog-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Bellanagare Bog: How a Bog Grows https://qualla.com/bellanagare-bog/ Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. A raised bog is a slow miracle. After the glaciers retreated, shallow lakes filled with reeds and sedges, and the dead plant matter, drowned in cold acidic water, never fully decomposed. Sphagnum moss colonised the dying lake, and sphagnum has the unusual habit of growing upward ...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/d/4/bellanagare-bog-wp/gcd4-bellanagare-bog-how-a-bog-grows.mp3 0:06 2 full Bellanagare Bog: Sphagnum, Geese, and Lawyers https://qualla.com/bellanagare-bog/ Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. The legal protection here is several layers deep. Bellanagare is a Special Area of Conservation under the EU Habitats Directive and a Special Protection Area under the Birds Directive. The SPA was designated for a flock of Greenland white-fronted geese - one of the rarest geese i...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/d/4/bellanagare-bog-wp/gcd4-bellanagare-bog-sphagnum-geese-and-lawyers.mp3 0:06 3 full Bellanagare Bog: The Turf-Cutters https://qualla.com/bellanagare-bog/ Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. For generations, families around Bellanagare cut their winter fuel from this bog. Turbary rights - the right to cut turf - were attached to specific houses and passed down with the deed. When the EU designations came in, that ancient practice came to a legal halt on protected sit...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/d/4/bellanagare-bog-wp/gcd4-bellanagare-bog-the-turf-cutters.mp3 0:06 4 full Bellanagare Bog: Drain by Drain https://qualla.com/bellanagare-bog/ Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. The active raised bog at Bellanagare - the part still wet enough to make new peat - was mapped at 49.6 hectares in 2014. The conservation plan aims to restore it to 139.1 hectares by blocking old drains, removing planted conifers, building marginal dams, re-profiling the surface,...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/d/4/bellanagare-bog-wp/gcd4-bellanagare-bog-drain-by-drain.mp3 0:06 5 full