Peat is a fuel – created by water, dried into a solid, turned into a gas alchemically – but it is also a preserver, an organic time machine. It hasn’t only conserved Angus’s footprint but also the microscopic pollen grains from millennia ago which were captured in the peat’s formation. They can tell us about ancient people’s first felling of trees to create agricultural land. Peat is burnt and turns to ash in the hearth, but miraculously it holds within itself the ashen fallout from Icelandic volcanoes cooked in the belly of the earth, then carried south on the wind; ash from the burning of
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