Step off the road north of Stornoway and within a few minutes you are walking on something that took ten thousand years to make. The Lewis Peatlands cover 58,984 hectares, more than a third of the island, an undulating surface of blanket bog dotted with thousands of small pools and lochans. It is one of the largest and most intact areas of blanket bog known anywhere in the world. From the air it looks like a slightly tilted brown sponge, scattered with mirrored splinters of sky. From the ground it looks like nothing but moor, until you start noticing how much is living in it.
Blanket bog forms where rainfall exceeds evaporation by a wide margin and the climate stays cool enough to slow decomposition. The Outer Hebrides qualify on both counts. Layer by sodden layer, sphagnum mosses build up over millennia, water-logged, acidic, starved of the bacteria that would otherwise return dead plants to the soil. The result is peat: carbon locked up by the accident of a wet climate and a refusal to rot. The Lewis Peatlands hold an enormous amount of that carbon. They also hold the marks of the long history of how islanders used the moor, from the cut-banks of generations of peat-cutting to the more recent pressure of agricultural improvement and forestry trials. The site is now the second-largest Ramsar site in Scotland, internationally recognized as a wetland of importance.
Beneath your boots, sphagnum moss holds twenty times its weight in water. Sundews catch midges on sticky red glands. Bog cotton stands in summer like white flags. But the great spectacle of the peatlands is the breeding bird population. The site supports an internationally important share of the world's breeding dunlin: as much as thirty percent of the global population nests here. Golden plovers and golden eagles hunt the open ground. Black-throated divers, scarce almost everywhere else in Britain, breed on the lochans tucked into the bog. The combination of waterlogged ground and small open water bodies is exactly what a great many wading and diving birds need, and exactly what the rest of Britain has lost almost everywhere. The Lewis Peatlands are one of the few places where you can still hear that older soundtrack of the moor at dawn in May, the bubbling calls of the divers carrying across pools that have been here longer than human memory.
The moor looks featureless from a passing car. The roads cross it on long straight lines and it can seem like nothing is happening out there. Get out and walk a hundred yards and the surface starts revealing itself: micro-topography of hummocks and hollows, dark peat pools fringed with cottongrass, the soft give of saturated moss underfoot. The pools come in two flavours that ecologists distinguish carefully: oligotrophic, very low in nutrients, supporting specialized plants and almost nothing else; and mesotrophic, slightly richer, with broader communities of life. Hidden among the pools are the eggs and chicks of birds whose nests are nearly impossible to find by chance. The peatlands are quiet country, easy to undervalue, doing a great deal of carbon-storage and wildlife-shelter work that the rest of the world is only beginning to take seriously.
The Lewis Peatlands centre on roughly 58.25 degrees north, 6.58 degrees west, covering a vast area across the northern and central parts of the Isle of Lewis. From the air the peatlands appear as an enormous mottled brown landscape with thousands of small black or reflective lochans scattered across it. Stornoway Airport (EGPO) is the obvious arrival point, about 10 miles east of the peatland's eastern edge. The A857 north toward Ness and the A858 west toward Carloway both cross significant stretches of bog. The character of the landscape is best appreciated at lower altitudes where the texture of pools and ridges becomes visible. In summer the moor is at its most colourful with cottongrass and flowering bog plants; in winter it is a study in browns and greys, punctuated by the glint of standing water.