A couple of things just to keep you all up to date, Stephen and I collected a couple of beautifully made oak benches for use on the boardwalk from Neil Philip's workshop between Muthill and Crieff. They are very solid and should last years but are so heavy that before we put them out on the boardwalk we just have to devise a system to stop them sinking deep into the peat once people start sitting on them. This is all part of working on what is really just a huge liquid blob with a thin crust of vegetation holding it all together. We can't just concrete them in as there is nothing substantial to concrete them to so a floating raft is likely to be the solution. The benches are in the work shop where they will be painted with several coats of teak oil to keep the water out. It is great to be able to use a local contractor and local Scottish oak for jobs like this.
On a different note Flanders Moss was on the TV again last night. It featured in the Making Scotland's Landscape series (programme 4 - watch it on the iPlayer on the BBC website, wwwbbc.co.uk). This is a series about man's impact on Scotland's landscape and Prof. Iain Stewart came to Flanders last March (see posting for 1 March 10) to talk about the peat clearances in the late 1700s / early 1800s. There are some nice panoramic shots of Flanders from the viewing tower but unfortunately the programme concentrated on the angle about how rubbish the land was for farming and how they spent such an effort clearing away they peat. I did talk about how people's perceptions of bogs in general and Flanders Moss specifically have changed since then and now people really appreciate the beauty and wildness of Flanders but this ended up on the cutting room floor. About the film, if you watch it, I would just like to point out that it was not me doing all that grunting.
