TURFCARROWMORE BOG
- Season
- Year 1 · Spring
- Bank
- £900
- Gang
- 30 days
- Order
- 0 / 150 t
H15 · your holding
- Face
- —
- Water
- —
- Grip
- —
- Moss
- —
Walk the face with the arrow keys.
The catchment
0.0 cm of drawdown below your lowest grip.
Stacks on the bank
- Nothing barrowed yet.
The bog is whole.
Carrowmore Bog · 20.3 hectares · you hold 7.3 of them
Turf
Peat is cut, dried and stacked. You cannot cut a bog that is still running, so first you drain it — with grips and ditches that pull the water table down over a hundred metres, and keep pulling after you stop.
Three years, three seasons each. A hundred and fifty tonnes of good peat, or the order is not filled. And the water you take out of this hill does not come back while the grips are open.
- Space dig a grip
- E / C / V hand, cutter, harvester
- K / R / J stack, cover, deliver
- Arrows walk the face · Enter end season
How a bog drains
- The water table
- On an undrained bog it sits about nine centimetres under the moss. Sphagnum holds it there. The moss is what keeps the bog a bog.
- Grips
- A grip is a spade-cut ditch to the permeable layer. One grip does not drain a field. A grid of them does, and a grid of them is expensive in days and money.
- Reach
- A grip draws the table down for a hundred metres or more, and deeper grips reach further. The drawdown crosses your boundary. The catchment plan shows it happening next door.
- Cutting
- You need about forty centimetres of air in the bank before a spade will go in. Cut there and not lower. The face is worth tonnes; the grip is worth nothing and costs everything.
- Oxidation
- Peat standing in air goes to carbon dioxide at a few centimetres a year, and does not come back. Filling the grips stops the bleeding. It does not put the peat back.
- Stacks
- Peat is stacked as cut, about 90% water. It dries over seasons. A tarpaulin slows the drying and keeps the rain off. The buyer takes it air dry or not at all.
- The years
- Year one is a dry summer. Year two is not — the glass has been falling since Candlemas, and an uncovered stack in that summer will rot where it stands.
The gang are stood down
Nothing dries and nothing oxidises while the game is paused.
Three parties, one afternoon
The bank is in. The water board, the peat contractor and the men from the Lower Moss have read the level gauges, and they want an answer.
Carrowmore Bog · three years