Documenting Ireland’s vanishing boglands: ‘They hold millennia in their layers’

“You can read Ireland’s history in the boglands. They hold millennia in their layers,” says photographer Shane Hynan of his project, Beofhód (meaning Beneath in English).

The boglands, known as portachs in Irish, cover roughly 1.2m to 1.5m hectares or about 14% to 17% of the country’s total land area. The raised bogs of the Irish Midlands are made of peat that forms at a rate of 1mm a year (0.04in) in low-lying, poorly drained basins or former lakes. As the historical geographer Kevin Whelan observes in the Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape, “the bog has been etched as deeply into the human as into the physical record in Ireland – to an extent unrivalled elsewhere.”

• Eddie and Con footing turf for domestic use, Knockirr Bog, County Kildare, 2022.

Hynan first became fascinated by them after an extended period of living abroad. “I’d gone from being an insider to an outsider. When I came home, I noticed how much the bogs had changed. In a good way, I saw fewer men cutting. In a bad way, I saw no money in the work any more.”

For generations turf from the bog was dried and cut into blocks, forming the primary fuel for rural households. Households using turf may spend up to €800 a year on heating, less than a quarter of the average Irish household’s annual energy bill. “It’s very, very cheap fuel. They can control the quality and quantity of it; you can’t really do that with anything else,” Hynan says.

• Peat separator for grading milled peat for horticultural use, near Carbury, County Kildare, 2019.

But the bogs were also under assault from other directions. Ireland contains 8% of the world’s blanket bogs – made of the remains of grasses and sedges, and found along the west coast’s mountainous areas – yet data from An Phríomh-Oifig Staidrimh (Ireland’s Central Statistics Office) revealed that more than 80% of the original peatland has been lost to extraction, afforestation, horticulture and/or agriculture.

“I reckon in 20 years … a lot will be gone,” says Hynan. “It’s a finite resource.”

• From top: Disused Bord na Móna tea hut #2, Ballydermot Bog Group, County Offaly, 2022; Mechanical hopper and conveyor belt for loading turf for horticultural use by private contractor, County Offaly, 2020.

The problem, beyond the effect on the landscape, is that peat bogs are one of the most important carbon sinks on the planet. A study published by the FarmPEAT project found that a healthy (Irish) raised bog can store up to 13 times more carbon per hectare than the Amazon rainforest, as carbon is stored underground instead of in short-lived vegetation.

• From top: Dominic footing turf for domestic use, Knockirr Bog, County Kildare, 2019; Tony’s footings, Knockirr Bog, County Kildare, 2017; Light industrial railway, Gilltown Bog, County Kildare, 2022.

So what to do? “These bogs are unresolved, just like my work,” Hynan claims. “I’m not trying to resolve anything … It’s a feeling that attaches me to them. When people’s voices started becoming louder in my head, I started to see a lot of disparities between ideas of what we should do, what’s really happening and how people are being demonised. It’s a very complex situation here in Ireland.”

He rejects the idea that his photography instructs or condemns: “I’m not being didactic and telling you to stop it. I’m here to question your relationship to the environment.

“There’s a real uncertainty in terms of the future for boglands, in the way we interact with them and how we perceive them, and how we use them.”

Shane Hynan, Beneath | Beofhód’, is at the Photo Museum Ireland until 5 July 2026.