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PET. Formation, cutting, and use as fuel. Peat is plant matter that did not finish becoming soil and did not finish becoming coal. It lies in wet ground where air is scarce, decay is slow, and each year's growth settles on the last. In a dry field, leaves and stems are taken apart by fungi and bacteria until little remains but mineral grains and a dark stain. In a bog or a fen, water fills the pores, oxygen does not last. The same organisms cannot work as they do on a well-drained bank. Stems, leaves, mosses, and roots accumulate. The mass darkens, packs, and holds water. That mass is peat. The places that make it are not all alike. A fen is fed by groundwater as well as rain. Its water carries dissolved minerals. The plants may be reeds, sedges, and taller herbs. The peat that forms there can be less acid and more mixed in its fibers. A bog is fed mainly by rain. Its water is poor in minerals and often sour. The characteristic plant of a raised or blanket bog in cool, wet climates is sphagnum moss, which holds water in its cells like a sponge, and makes the surface still wetter and more acid as it grows. Blanket bog spreads as a skin over humid uplands. Raised bog builds a low dome above the surrounding drain, thicker in the middle than at the edges. In either case, the living surface is only the top of a much older pile. Two layers are useful to name. The aquatome is the upper zone, a few centimeters to a few tens of centimeters, where the water table rises and falls, and a little air still comes and goes. Roots live there. Water moves there more freely. The catotelm is the saturated mass below, permanently wet, almost without oxygen, and very slow to change. Once plant matter has been buried into the catotelm, it may stay recognizable for a very long time: a reed stem, a birch twig, a beetle wing. The annual addition at the surface is small. In many temperate bogs, the net rise of the surface is measured in millimeters per year, not centimeters. A peat bed several meters thick is a clock that has been running for thousands of years. The material itself varies with depth and with the plants that made it. Fresh phagnum peat near the top is pale, springy, and full of uncollapsed leaves. Older peat is darker, denser, and more humified. The structures have broken down into a brown or black paste that still holds fibers. Fen peat may show reed stems in a muddy matrix. Woody peat holds roots and trunks of trees that once stood on a drier surface and were later drowned as the bog rose. A spade put into a bank will cut different stuff at knee height and at waist height. The cutter learns the bank by feel. As fuel, peat was cut where coal was dear and bogs were near. Ireland, the Scottish Highlands and Islands, parts of England and Wales, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and great stretches of Russia and Canada all had districts where turf or peat was the ordinary domestic fire. The work followed the year. Spring and early summer were for cutting, when the ground had thawed, and a long drying season still lay ahead. Midsummer and late summer were for turning and stacking. Autumn was for bringing the dry turf home. Winter was for burning it. The tools are few. A slain or peat spade has a long handle and a narrow blade, often with a side wing, so that a brick-shaped turf can be cut in one stroke. A shorter spade or a knife trims the face of the bank. A fork or a barrow moves the wet sods. In some districts, a breast spade is pushed by the thigh. In others, the cutter stands in the trench and lifts each turf up onto the bank. The names change from county to county. The gesture does not. A slice, a lift, a layout on the grass. A working face is a bank. The top living skin, heather, moss, and roots is stripped first and set aside. That skin may be thrown back later to leave the cut less raw. Below it, the cutter marks a line and takes turfs and rows, each turf a rectangular block, commonly something like a short brick or a thick tile, sized to the slain into one person's lift. Wet peat is heavy. A turf that will be light as a dry cake is at the moment of cutting a sod of cold water and fiber. The first row is laid on the bank to drip. The next row comes from the same face, a step deeper or a step along. A good day's cutting is measured in hundreds of sods, not in drama. The sound is the suck of the blade and the wet clap of turf on turf. Drying is the long part. Fresh peat may be four-fifths water by weight, it cannot be stacked in a tight heap like firewood, without rotting or remaining wet at the core. The first stage is often a spread on the cut surface or on nearby grass, each turf separate enough for wind to pass. After some days the sods are set on edge, or leaned in pairs, or built into small open footings, little tents and ridges whose only purpose is air. Later they go into larger stacks, still with gaps, still with a thatch or a sloping top to shed rain. In Irish and Scottish practice, the stack, rick, or clamp is a familiar shape on the bog in late summer. Dark walls of turf, a careful roof, a path worn to it, rain can set the work back, a dry wind can save it. The cutter does not command the weather. He turns the sods when the weather allows. When the turf rings lightly and has lost its cold weight, it is ready to cart. The load may go by donkey, by sled, by barrow, or by boat, if the bog is cut with channels. At the house it is stacked again, this time for the winter, under eaves or in a shed or in a tight clamp near the door. A household's year can be red in that pile. Too small a stack means a thin fire before spring. Too wet a stack means smoke and a hiss on the hearth. On the fire, Pete does not behave like coal or like seasoned hardwood. It lights more readily than wet wood and less fiercely than good coal. It gives a steady spreading heat and a characteristic smell, faintly sweet or earthy, that people who grew up with it can name in another country. It leaves a soft ash. It does not clinker as some coals do. The caloristic value, weight for weight, is lower than that of coal. More bulk is needed for the same warmth. That is why the stacks are large and why a bog near a village was a kind of field, harvested rather than mined in the coal pit sense. Where peat was the only fuel, the rhythm of cutting was as fixed as the rhythm of hay. Hand cutting of this sort is a shallow working of the surface. A bank may be taken down a meter or two over years. Deeper industrial cuttings, with railways and dredges and milling machines, belonged to another scale, the drained raised bogs of the Low Countries and Ireland, in the age of the power station and the peat briquette. Those works still begin from the same substance. They change the speed and the depth. A milled peat field is a brown prairie of crumbs, scraped in thin layers and windrowed to dry. A sod peat machine extrudes wet blocks that then sit in rows like the hand cut turfs. The physics of drying does not change. Water must leave. Wind and sun must be given faces to work on. Under the microscope, or in the hand of a geologist, peat is also a document. Pollen grains lodged in the wet mass record the plants of the surrounding country year by year. A shift from tree pollen to grass and weed pollen can mark clearance. A band of charcoal can mark a fire. A change in moss species can mark a wetter or a drier climate. Because the catotelm keeps what it is given, a bog can be read as a damp archive. The fuel cutter does not read it, he wants a clean bank and a turf that holds together on the slain. The two uses, fire and record, occupy the same ground. Not every wet organic soil is cut for the hearth. Some peat is too muddy, too thin, or too mixed with clay. Some lies under protection or under pasture that is worth more as grass. Some is too far from a road. The bogs that were cut hardest were those within reach of houses that had little wood. Islands and treeless coasts used turf as a matter of course. Wooded valleys did not. The map of peep cutting is a map of need as much as a map of bogs. Horticulture found another use, like fibrous phagnum peat, holds water and air in a pot. By the late 20th century, it was a standard ingredient in greenhouse composts. That use is a different harvest, not a dense black fuel turf but a pale, springy fiber taken from the upper layers. It is mentioned here only to keep the inventory complete. The older and quieter use remains the fire, a single turf on a hearth goes through a short life. It is set on a bed of ash or on a few coals. It darkens then shows a red edge, smoke thins, the block shrinks and cracks. In a closed stove, the burn is even and long. On an open hearth, it is slower to look at than a stick of ashwood, and less showy than a lump of coal. For sleep, that is the right pace. The same pace belongs to the bog. Rain falls, phagnum swells, a leaf falls into a pool and does not quite rot. Next year, another leaf. The water table sits in the moss. A man with a slain, much later, cuts a brick from that patience and stands it on its edge in the wind. The ground after cutting is a series of trenches and box, or a lowered flat, often wetter in the cuts and drier on the remaining ribs. If the living skin was replaced, moss may creep back. If the drain was deepened to dry the works, the bog may not return to what it was. Older hand cuttings, shallow and patchy, sometimes heal into rough pasture or into a wet mosaic. The landscape keeps the pattern of the banks the way a field keeps ridge and furrow, a memory of repeated strokes. Words gather around the work and are worth listing slowly. Turbery is the right to cut turf on a piece of bog, a right that could attach to a farm as meadow rights attach to a farm. A bank is the working face, a wet turf is a sod, a dry turf is fuel, a clamp or rick is the drying stack, a slain is the spade, resting is a way of putting the body behind the blade. Winning turf is the whole sequence from cut to house. In Dutch, a similar fuel is turf. In German, torf. In the north of England and in Ireland, the household word is often just turf, and peat is the more bookish name. The substance does not care. Chemistry kept to a few sentences, says the same as the spade. Peat is rich in carbon compared with fresh plants, poorer in carbon than coal, it still contains much oxygen and hydrogen, bound in incomplete structures. Buried longer, heated and pressed, it would move toward lignight, in the bog it stops short. That is why it still looks like plants and why it still burns with a vegetable smell. Coal is a different chapter. Peat is the chapter that did not finish. A listener who wants only the sleep of the thing can stay with the year. In March, the bog is cold and the water is high. In May the slain starts. In June, the banks are brown with wet bricks. In July, the little ridges stand on the grass. In August the ricks go up. In September, the cart comes. In November, the first turves of the new stack go on the fire. In January the stack is lower. In March, there is a calculation about whether the last rows will last until the new cutting hardens. Then the year is the same year again. The bog has added another millimeter that no one sees. That millimeter is the whole subject in miniature. A moss grows, it dies in place, water keeps the air out, the next moss grows. Time is thick, not fast. The cutter's day is long, but each stroke is small and the drying takes the rest of the summer. The fire at the end of the chain is a quiet fire. For a podcast that means to be soporific, peat is a topic that does not need to be made dull. It is already as slow as it looks