Alys Fowler- Peatlands

2.30 at the Castle Hotel
Alys Fowler, in this, her latest book, asks the bog “for its story”. From studying sphagnum mosses in the unheated conservatories at Kew Gardens to patting coriander seeds into freshly watered soils on Gardeners’ World, she has always been interested in that which is – to use some of her chapter titles – “wet”, “dark”, “growing”, “cool” and “saturated”. Here, she frames peatlands as crucial organic matter that needs protecting, as well as liminal, multitudinous spaces “formed from layers of its former selves”. Peat contains heaps of aggregated material – moss and other plants slowly build the peat over time into layers. In the northern hemisphere, it takes a year to grow a millimetre of peat, 1,000 years to grow a metre. Fowler describes bogs as a “parallel dimension” where “the laws of the human universe [play out] differently”. Iron Age burials demonstrate how, unlike soil or air, they favour softness, preserving flesh near-perfectly while bones disappear from the inside. In acidic, waterlogged, low-oxygen conditions, decomposition is kept to a minimum and organisms are “dead but not gone”, layered in “suspended animation”.

Above all, Fowler treats peatlands as her places, both literally (she lives between the raised bogs Cors Fochno and Cors Caron in midwest Wales) and figuratively (seeing in them a queer history of being “neither this nor that”). Moving away from the “clock-time environments” of emails and cities, Fowler spends her days and nights with the sequential “archive” of mercurial acrotelm (the top, living peat layer) and dense catotelm (the deceased peat underworld). She spends days walking through terrain that is as tricky as it is severe. “It is slow and you can’t get anywhere directly”, she writes. Making your way through the mire, “you have to like the untrodden path…

Ticket & Access information

The earlybird price of £8.00 will continue until the 31 st March, it will then increase to £10.00, unless you live within 10 miles of Llandovery in which case it will remain at £8.00, you can buy the reduced tickets at the shop..

You will be able to collect or buy your very special tickets, an artwork in themselves, from the bookshop, if you buy your tickets online make sure you click local collection or you will be charged for postage, you may want to print off a copy of your order.

The Castle Hotel is fully accessible.