The Liminality of Boglands

Caught by the River · Sep 29, 2026

Dead nor alive, safe nor dangerous, beautiful nor dreadful, bogs are thresholds that refuse categorisation, writes Merritt R. Turetsky, in an extract from her book ‘Boglands’.

Bogs are messy and wild, places the human mind has difficulty understanding. Can we comprehend a place suspended between life and death? Do we want to? Most folklore around the world portrays boglands as places of venerable fear, filled with danger, disorientation, and disillusion, “without clear borders and without solid sub-stance below.” As a child, the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney was told never to go…