Student intern and Composer: Natasha Currie (English, Psychology, and a keen folk musician)
Supervisors: Lydia Cole (School of Geography and Sustainable Development), Althea Davies (School of Geography and Sustainable Development), Jane Pettegree (Laidlaw Music Centre), Katherine Roucoux (School of Geography and Sustainable Development)
Featuring: the voices of the Portmoak Moss Community Group
With thanks to site owners, The Woodland Trust.
Scottish lowland peat bogs, such as the one at Portmoak in West Fife (see above), help to lock in carbon, and also provide a unique habitat for plants, insects, birds and animals that thrive around Sphagnum moss and wet places.
But these sites are fragile and have a complicated relationship with humans. In the past, humans have extracted peat for domestic fuel from these places. Many wetland sites generally in Lowland Scotland have been drained over the centuries by farmers, and by high-density conifer plantation in the 1960s and 1970s which contributed to the drying-out of the Portmoak site.
The site was bought by the Woodland Trust in 1996, since which time both they and their partners in the adjacent village of Scotlandwell have been working hard to restore the bog to a healthy peatland (i.e. wet, acidic, usually treeless). Actions undertaken include introducing peripheral dams, and also felling dense plantations from the centre of the site, where the peat is over 6 metres deep. Community involvement has concentrated on preventing self-seeding trees from recolonising the restored central section, and also with local education projects.
What the site presents today is a central restored raised bog area rich in wetland plants, a reservoir for insect life and therefore birds who feed on these insects, with a fringe of peripheral mixed woodland.
This BIRCH project aimed to make a “soundscape” composition that would reflect both the place and the local human community who today are vital to its maintenance and continued survival as wetland. The approach combined folk music with environmental sound and interviews with local volunteers. This approach aims to communicate both the unique nature of the site and what it means to local residents: the soundscape communicates the site’s ‘deep’ history in time layered alongside residents’ human-scaled memories of recent restoration activities.
The message is that peat bogs such as this one are a kind of time capsule containing various kinds of treasure: physically, holding the carbon locked away in the peat over thousands of years; and metaphorically, holding memories, affections and efforts of local people.
We hope that this combination of information and emotional content speaks affectively to others who listen to the soundscape composition. The final composition can be found on the Laidlaw Music Centre Youtube channel, where you can learn about the site and hear how communities can make a positive contribution to their local environment:
QR Code to Portmoak Soundscape
