Dark, dank and mysterious: the haunting strangeness of boglands
From our UK edition
‘Bog’ is an unlovely word, and the expressions in the bog lexicon – ‘bogged down’, ‘bog standard’, ‘bog off’ – are pretty unappealing too. When Roald Dahl created Bruce Bogtrotter in Matilda he invited us to envisage an obese, unattractive boy. But when Merritt R. Turetsky, aged 20, encountered her first bog, it ‘pulled me in, and I have never looked back’. Three decades on, she is never happier than when landing on a bog in a helicopter or float-plane, heading out across trembling sphagnum in her chest waders, lying on her stomach with her ‘face pressed close to the bog surface’, or ‘getting down and dirty with the peat’.
