from Bog Witch

This slightly adapted extract comes from Mab's book Bog Witch, available from Moon Books>>

Mud, by rights, is dirty, stinky, and oozy. It is sticky, squelchy, unpalatable stuff. Wetlands are so-called because they are mud-filled. As a poet, I can name plenty of poems taking the sea or the forest as their setting, but very few in homage to or even venturing into marshland. They are a bit too squelchy and, therefore, silly for very lofty verse. They're the dippy, drippy, lesser cousin of epic oceans, magical woodlands, wild moors, etc. They’re more difficult to define, being made up of two intermingled elements with borders that are indistinguishable, and this makes them less dramatically appealing. Plus, when you walk through fens, your boots often sink into their stool-coloured sludge, and when you pull them out there’s a wet noise that’s something like a fart. Even its creatures are more ugly-funny, perhaps, than those of other, more elemental territories: warty toads, weirdo newts, slowworms with their flat forked tongues and strangely lidded eyes. Soggy, blobby, clotty, and slow, the cultural creatures of the wetlands are hard to take very seriously.

From the silly, then, these entities veer towards the spooky and the sinister. This is particularly the case when we begin to look away from contemporary culture into the myths and legends that preempt them. Perhaps it’s because we’re now such a knowing, media-driven species, who can get a better grip on these muddy terrains through documentary and online articles, that we’re able to laugh at our ancestors’ fear of bog creatures by creating parodies in toys, tales, and images. Once, though, bogs were far more fearsome places, and that fear fed our imaginations and our resultant sense of them. In English folklore, a boggart inhabits marshes and fens but can also be a malevolent spirit in the household. In Welsh, the boggart may be more readily linked to the pwca / bwga, or fairy folk, and is similarly mischievous in nature. Bogeymen are an associated entity, and it’s clear, with that one, that the ‘indistinct’ aspect is far more terrifying than humorous.

We may, now, rationalise our fears, but it’s still too easy to keep thinking of bogs as a joke. Damselflies gestate here as ugly bugs, fat larvae swimming in murk – but then they emerge like punchlines, like brilliant conclusions, for two weeks of life as an iridescent flying creature. Toads blink, beady-eyed, before their lolling bodies pop into the air like jumping beans and plop into the stool-coloured water. Flowers in this murk might be as bright and brief as firecrackers; there are many rare orchids in and near the wetlands next to my home, which are as strange and silly as the shapes they make – this one, which emulates a bee; this one, with a shape akin to a butterfly. They make brief appearances – for one week only! – demanding our attention, much like travelling clowns.

But a small shift in our thinking, and in our interpretation of what is before our eyes, transforms the bog from base to beautiful; from banal to breathtaking. We must learn to marvel at her boggy body, which gives life to moths and mushrooms, toads and tubers. Her processes are nothing short of miraculous. She may not be as pretty as a picture, but the picture she paints is perfect, and just as gorgeous in its own way. Wetlands are a wild and wonderful aspect of Wales, which have much to offer us, if we choose to see her strange, soggy body not as horrific, or as humorous, but as miraculous. We must peek into her pools and see not pollution, but wonder. And, luckily for us, wetlands are never far away: they often exist at the edge of a city; where town meets river; or are, in fact, simply that ‘icky’ place where you know your shoes won’t do because of the amount of mud there. Wellies or waders will allow you to follow your own adventure into these misunderstood and much maligned places; and this book will give you the means of seeing them with new eyes.

And so, let us begin transforming our view of the wetlands of Wales, from swamp to splendour; from fen to fantastic. There's no need for the mind to boggle, or get bogged down, in this one. This magickal process of transformation is begun in the simplest of ways – we start by simply stepping out and into the wetlands themselves.