Landscapes of Work and Power

Peatlands have also provided places of refuge for the poor, the dispossessed. It is not accident, for example, that tenant farmers removed from their lands during the Irish famine frequently turned to the bogland as a place of final resort. People who lived in these areas were often viewed as uncivilised and savage, as Lord Macauley, Victorian historian remarked: 

‘In that dreary region covered by vast flights of wild fowl, a half savage population led an amphibious life, sometimes wading and sometimes rowing from one islet of firm ground to another^[1]’ 

In addition to their poverty and unusual lifestyle, other writers stress inhabitants’ individualism and hostility to outsiders. For example, it was believed that fenmen were idle as they did not cultivate the land but only grazed animals and that they were dishonest but prosperous. In the early nineteenth century, the historian John Hunter (1828, 158) of South Yorkshire condemned the people of Hatfield Chase by saying that: 

“The peasantry of a country abounding in game will be less civilized and less tractable than where there is not the same temptation to brave the hazards which attend nocturnal depredation … the temptations to marauding and plunder were great in the vicinity of a well stocked chase, in which no owner resided, and the lawless spirit which such a mode of life would generate, is probably to be in part attributed the violence with which the natives of these regions opposed the persons who undertook to reclaim the flooded land^[2]” 

The contrasting themes illustrated in these quotations are poverty on one hand and over- abundance on the other, but their general tenor is insularity, hostility and idleness. People who lived in wetlands were obviously seen as very unpleasant people,^[3] though John Hunter’s quote also highlights that their lawlessness and violence was likely the consequence of their loss of land and livelihood because of land drainage activities in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

It is not surprising, therefore, that as part of a movement to make these places ‘more productive’ and their people less ‘uncivilised’ in the 18^th -20^th centuries, peatlands were heavily exploited for their peat resources, for fuel and horticulture, on an industrial scale and transformed by drainage and reclamation works to turn them into productive agricultural areas. Some of our most important lowland peatlands are now buried beneath agricultural land, in some of the most agriculturally productive parts of the UK, such as Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. Elsewhere, upland peatlands have been transformed through use the use of fertilisers to create productive grazing lands. Many of our upland landscapes have been transformed in this way, leading to massive loss of blanket peatlands as a habitat.  

Peatlands are also focal points for political power. They have played a central role in the negotiation of identity and nationhood during the past two hundred years and more recently have been at the heart of the emergence of environmental politics.  Depictions of peatlands have been used to marginalise those on the fringes of Modern society but they have also been potent symbols of identity. They have provided space, physical and symbolic, within which to rethink our relationships with each other and the lands which we inhabit.  

In this section of the exhibition, we juxtapose historical and contemporary art, archival materials and scientific writing and imagery to explore the various ways in which concepts of work and power have inflected our understanding of peatlands. We will examine representations of peatlands as working landscapes and will ask how these representations have informed contemporary attitudes to and uses of these spaces. We will also look at our changing relationships with peatlands and examine the ways in which the shifting power relationships of peatlands have altered and in some created peatlands as we find them today.  

Gareth Beale and Nicki J. Whitehouse 

^[1] Cited by D. Byford, Agricultural Change in the lowlands of south Yorkshire with special reference to the Manor of Hatfield 1600-c. 1875, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 2005, p. 2

^[2] J. Hunter. South Yorkshire, the History and Topography the’ Deanery of Doncaster, 2 Volumes (1828 and 1831), p. 157.

^[3] D. Byford, Op. cit. p. 4.