Despite how often I’ve read about the U.K.’s mysterious and danger-filled moorlands in the works of Dickens and the Brontës, growing up in the coastal rainforest of the Pacific Northwest as I did it has never fully made sense to me how so many people have for so long perceived such peril in what appears to be simply a softly colored landscape of gently rolling hillocks and the occasional dramatic stone outcrop. How could anyone possibly – as I’ve read so many times – become lost there, and even die of exposure for Pete’s sake, in such a open and gently rounded terrain?
Well, it didn’t take reading very many pages into Donald S. Murray‘s new book The Dark Stuff; Stories from the Peatlands to quickly correct my many years of misperceptions about these truly fascinating, and richly-storied lands. Beginning with his own upbringing on the Isle of Lewis, and then moving outward to consider other moorlands across Europe and beyond, Murray mixes memoir, the poetry of place, and natural history to bring his readers into a more rich and nuanced understanding of just what it is that makes these places of legend and mystery the remarkable places they are.
