Qualla: Bourtange moor https://qualla.com/bourtange-moor en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:34 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/m/h/bourtange-moor-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Bourtange moor https://qualla.com/bourtange-moor Bourtange moor: Introduction https://qualla.com/bourtange-moor/ Photo credit Axel Hindemith, CC BY 3.0. Around 5000 BC, the rain stopped draining away from a low valley in what is now northeastern Netherlands and northwestern Germany. The ground stayed wet. Mosses grew. The mosses died, were buried under more mosses, and over five thousand years a bog formed — sphagnum, sedge, and peat layered into a soft black landscape three thousand square kilometers across. It was big enough to swallow armies, and several times it did. It was also wet enough to preserve a body for two thousand years, and several times it did that too. Most of it is gone now. Drained, cut, burned for fuel, planted in buckwheat. But a remnant survives on the international border at the Bargerveen-Bourtanger Moor nature park, and the bog bodies pulled from the peat are still on display in northern European museums.

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Image: Axel Hindemith | CC BY 3.0

]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/m/h/bourtange-moor-wp/u1mh-bourtange-moor-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Bourtange moor: A V-Shaped Wilderness Between Two Provinces https://qualla.com/bourtange-moor/ Photo credit Axel Hindemith, CC BY 3.0. The Bourtanger Moor had the shape of a V, opening to the south. The western leg followed the valley of the Hunze river up toward the city of Groningen, hemmed in by a low ridge called the Hondsrug. The eastern leg ran south through the valley of the Ems, into what is now German E...

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Image: Axel Hindemith | CC BY 3.0

]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/m/h/bourtange-moor-wp/u1mh-bourtange-moor-a-v-shaped-wilderness-between-two-provinces.mp3 0:06 2 full Bourtange moor: The Wars the Bog Won https://qualla.com/bourtange-moor/ Photo credit Axel Hindemith, CC BY 3.0. Between roughly 1580 and 1850, the swamp had a serious military function. Armies could not cross it, so generals fought over the few hard tracks that did. The wars between the city of Groningen and the Bishop of Münster ran for decades along its edges, and wherever a passage exis...

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Image: Axel Hindemith | CC BY 3.0

]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/m/h/bourtange-moor-wp/u1mh-bourtange-moor-the-wars-the-bog-won.mp3 0:06 3 full Bourtange moor: Peat, Canals, and the Straight Line https://qualla.com/bourtange-moor/ Photo credit Axel Hindemith, CC BY 3.0. Real industrial peat-cutting began in the sixteenth century, when Frisian engineers introduced a method of digging long parallel canals to drain a bog and float the cut peat out to market. In the seventeenth century, the city of Groningen took control of Westerwolde and commissio...

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]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/m/h/bourtange-moor-wp/u1mh-bourtange-moor-peat-canals-and-the-straight-line.mp3 0:06 4 full Bourtange moor: The Bog Bodies https://qualla.com/bourtange-moor/ Photo credit Axel Hindemith, CC BY 3.0. Peat is anoxic, acidic, and cold. Drop a body into it and the body does not rot. Several times, over centuries of digging, workers cut into something that turned out to be a person — Iron Age or early Roman, leathered brown by the bog acids, sometimes with the rope still around t...

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]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/m/h/bourtange-moor-wp/u1mh-bourtange-moor-the-bog-bodies.mp3 0:06 5 full Bourtange moor: What Is Left https://qualla.com/bourtange-moor/ Photo credit Axel Hindemith, CC BY 3.0. By the twentieth century, peat had stopped being a serious fuel — coal and then oil took the market. Cutting continued, but for different products: activated charcoal, peat compost called turfstrooisel, and potting soil. After the Amsterdamse Veld in southeast Drenthe was finally...

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]]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/m/h/bourtange-moor-wp/u1mh-bourtange-moor-what-is-left.mp3 0:06 6 full