LAST week I thought I had struck gold when I threw the garden on the fire and found it burned so well, but then I got a shiver down my spine as I realised I was destroying part of the UK's finest blanket bog along with its moss and midges.
Herein lies the dilemma of living in a working landscape as opposed to a preserved ideal.
Many years ago I studied landscape architecture and, within that course, students were taught to understand the landscape and be suspicious of the conservation ideals that equated to preservation. We were taught to view Scotland's landscapes as working ecosystems, many of which have human inhabitants.
Biodiversity was pointed out to be a rather meaningless buzzword when applied to ecosystems that naturally contain few species, if you can correctly use the term "natural" for these landscapes anyway.
Up in the frozen North, we live in a potential World Heritage site - some 4000 square kilometres of blanket bog, the Flow Country. It is a stunningly beautiful landscape that deserves to be treated with care, but is it a bog ecosystem or an open-air museum? There are several campaigns going on, some more hysterical than others, to save the Flow Country from its threats - peat cutting, drainage, forestry, etc. We can add to that list the supposed threat of wind farms, which, like the others, is only a threat if you feel it to be so.
I suppose you could say the efforts involved in creating working farmland are also unnatural, so farming could also be a threat to the blanket bog. Roads can also be seen as scarring the landscape, houses can be an unwelcome intrusion where then can you draw the line? When you live in Caithness you are forced to understand that people need to live in rural areas and all that entails, and the line between conservation and development is a personal, subjective choice.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) asks people to donate to its Flow Country appeal to help remove two million spruce trees from Forsinard and Dyke. The RSPB will then "re-profile the miles of damaged furrows, ridges and tree stumps, and ensure that the habitat is suitable once more for moisture-loving plants".
The RSPB website says: "Please help us before it's too late. For each year the plantations remain, they continue to suck the water from the fragile peat, and shade out other plants and wildlife which characterise the Flow Country."
Conifer plantations are "literally sucking the life out of this precious habitat", according to the RSPB.
AFTER lying down in a darkened room to calm down, I then read about the I Don't Dig Peat campaign run by the Garden Organic charity. It tells folks using peat from the garden centre that they are living the "good lie" by believing that growing their own food is good for the environment. Little do they know they are actually ruining an important habitat.
The charity claims "in striving to be self-sufficient, they're inadvertently doing more harm than good to the environment".
"Of the three million cubic metres of peat used in the UK every year, amateur gardeners are responsible for needlessly using two-thirds of it, largely in the form of multi-purpose compost. Peat is used in compost because it's cheap, light, retains moisture and stores nutrients. However, in extracting peat from its natural home, its ability to store four times as much carbon as forest is lost, while the habitat of rare wildlife is destroyed.
"As a result, all but a tiny proportion of the UK's natural peatlands have been wiped out forever," it maintains.
"Garden Organic surveyed UK garden owners about their gardening habits and motivations, and it seems the pursuit of the good life is more popular than ever. A surprising 69 per cent of those surveyed use their gardens to grow vegetables, and almost 45 per cent named living the good life as their motivation for gardening. Attracting wildlife and being more environmentally friendly are also important to amateur gardeners, with a third of respondents declaring that these factors motivate them to garden."
The charity went on: "However, when it comes to purchasing products to achieve the good life, it seems that gardeners' 'eco' motivations are quickly forgotten. It's what's best for their pockets, not the planet, that influences them most.
"Indeed, three times as many chose low prices and special offers as the deciding factors of which products to buy, as opposed to what's best for the environment. This marked contrast is also reflected in the products regularly bought by gardeners, with around three times as many choosing multi-purpose peat-based composts over peat-free alternatives."
So from this we could assume gardeners are a serious threat to our bogs.
THE value of peat bogs is as much qualitative as it is quantitative, particularly to us folks up north, as we see it all the time and think "midges". It reminds me of the endless ridicule I withstood valiantly while living in the peat expanse of Spittal for several years.
"You live in Spittal?!" people would say, while screwing up their faces and peering at me, "Why?". Err, because I like it. Or "who the f*** would live in Spittal?" and "it's a village best seen at 100 mph" or "the home of tumbleweed". Yeah, yeah, tell me one I haven't heard before.
Spittal was the end of the earth, according to others in Caithness, and the A9 Causewaymire was the road that led to falling off the flat earth, but as soon as the Causewaymire wind turbines were erected, the area was suddenly described as spoiled natural beauty and even dubbed the last great wilderness of northern Europe.
We support the Flow Country nature reserves as they protect our "natural" and local environment. But the last local people I spoke to who went to the RSPB reserve at Forsinard for a walk said there were "no birds or flowers" and it was a "massive midge reserve".
This is the result of Caithness relativity which results in, for example, mires being boring and unworthy of a second visit but then eye-wateringly beautiful and endangered if there is a wind-farm proposal or other unwanted development.
Our archaeological heritage is also regularly abused - I have heard several people say Camster Cairns are just a "pile of stones in the middle of a peat bog".
This year midge expert Alison Blackwell, of the Scottish Midge Forecast, is predicting a boom in midge numbers, so if you are planning a trip to one of our blanket bogs, don't forget to smoke plenty fags while you are there (and extinguish them properly), or get some insect repellent.
n Corrina can be contacted via Facebook and followed on Twitter @CorrinaThomson.
