Qualla: Flow Country

Flow Country: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Tryon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Flow is a Scots word for a bog. It probably came north from the Old Norse - the Icelandic word floi means the same thing - and the Vikings who named it knew what they were looking at. Four thousand square kilometres of waterlogged peat lies across Caithness and Sutherland, the largest blanket bog in Europe, dotted with thousands of small pools that catch the sky. The peat is on average three metres thick. In some places it is more than ten. The whole thing has been quietly growing since the last ice age ended, building up about a millimetre a year, with the dead remains of sphagnum moss accumulating faster than they can decay - because the water keeps them anaerobic, and the anaerobes preserve them. What you walk on in the Flow Country is, in effect, ten thousand years of plants that never quite finished dying.

Read more: Flow Country on Qualla

Image: Andrew Tryon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Flow Country: The Carbon in the Ground

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Scotland_location_map.svg: Eric Gaba, NordNordWest derivative work: Uwe Dedering, CC BY-SA 3.0. Peat is dead vegetation, and vegetation is mostly carbon. The Flow Country holds an enormous amount of it - more carbon, by some estimates, than all the trees of Britain combined. Left alone, this carbon stays in the ground. Drained, dried, dug, or burned, it goes into the atmosp...

Read more: Flow Country on Qualla

Image: Scotland_location_map.svg: Eric Gaba, NordNordWest derivative work: Uwe Dedering | CC BY-SA 3.0

Flow Country: The Forestry Disaster

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit michael clarke stuff, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the 1970s and 1980s, the British government created tax breaks designed to encourage commercial forestry. Wealthy investors discovered that by buying tracts of upland and planting them with non-native conifers - Sitka spruce, mostly - they could shelter income from tax at a re...

Read more: Flow Country on Qualla

Image: michael clarke stuff | CC BY-SA 2.0

Flow Country: What Lives Here

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Tryon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Stand still on a Flow Country boardwalk in June and the bog tells you what it is by sound. A greenshank pipes from somewhere unseen. A snipe drums - that vibrating mechanical note made by its tail feathers in a display dive. A golden plover whistles a long, slow note. A hen harri...

Read more: Flow Country on Qualla

Image: Andrew Tryon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Flow Country: Restoration in Geological Time

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Tryon, CC BY-SA 2.0. The RSPB has been buying back drained, planted land for decades. The conifers are felled and left to rot in the plough furrows, in the hope that in thirty to a hundred years the bog will return. This is not gardening; it is a project conducted on the timescale of peat itself. Aro...

Read more: Flow Country on Qualla

Image: Andrew Tryon | CC BY-SA 2.0