The bog holds a unique place in Irish culture. They are barren and worthless to the outsider. 'Bogger' is often a term of abuse for those from the countryside. To those who work them, they are places of backbreaking work and battle against swarms of biting midges in pursuit of winter fuel self-sufficiency. Being, in most cases, unfit for machine harvesting by individuals, they are places where hand tools still dominate, some archaic and passed down several generations. So bogs are places of continuity and tradition. They are also places where the mind can take flight and find beauty amid the rhythmic cutting, spreading, turning and footing of the sod. Patrick Kavanagh found wonder there in his poem The One; "Green, blue, yellow and red – God is down in the swamps and marshes Sensational as April and almost incred- ible the flowering of our catharsis. A humble scene in a backward place Where no one important ever looked The raving flowers looked up in the face Of the One and the Endless, the Mind that has baulked The profoundest of mortals. A primrose, a violet, A violent wild iris – but mostly anonymous performers Yet an important occasion as the Muse at her toilet Prepared to inform the local farmers That beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God Was breathing His love by a cut-away bog." In Nostos, John Moriarty recalled bog, as an archeologist might, as a chance to go "down below history": "Cutting turf every year in the bog, we worked our way down into a world no human being had ever set foot on. By midday every day for five days we would be uncovering the floor of an ancient pine forest. The preserved tree stumps and trunks we'd uncover we called bogdeal. Sometimes the bark of a trunk we'd uncover would be as distinct as it was on the day it fell, frightening birds or deer into flight. "Of one thing we could be sure, and that was that it fell long before even the most mythic of our ancestors walked here...I didn't know it in any very conscious way then, but I now know that this sacrament of going down below history had, by the time I was ten years old, given a direction, never afterwards much altered, to my life. "But we didn't only stand deeper than Ireland in the bog. We sat deeper than Ireland by our fire." Image: Men cutting turf, Ballinskelligs, Co. Kerry (1947). National Folklore Collection, UCD.