Draining the bog

Perhaps over 100 years ago Crofters took care to drain the wettest parts of the croft by digging drainage ditches, by hand. These drains are now neglected, full of vegetation, soil and developing peat; the result is large areas of boggy grazing full of rushes and snails that host liver fluke.

So my neighbour Alistair and I decided to improve things by clearing the drain that runs across both crofts and ends up in a burn. There's no point in clearing part of the system or you'll end up with another bog.

When the drains were originally dug, by hand, I guess that it took about three weeks. Today the mini-digger did the job in three hours. not counting the time it took to extract the digger from the wettest part of the bog.So we should have some better grazing and a lower incidence of liver fluke, its difficult to quantify the benefit but it has to be done and its still wet enough for the yellow flag iris.