If you’re looking for a natural high, then head for Flanders Moss near Stirling. This bogland national nature reserve offers a great new visitor experience, as reserve manager David Pickett reports
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How do you show people a bogland nature reserve that’s fragile and hazardous to walk over, and which local people think is dangerous to visit?
That’s been our challenge at Flanders Moss National Nature Reserve (NNR), which lies some 16 km (10 miles) west of Stirling. For the last six years, we‘ve been working to overcome the ideas that people had about the place and show them what a wonderful location lies within an hour’s drive of most of the Scottish population. This work reached its peak recently with the opening of a seven metre (23 feet) high viewing tower that provides spectacular views across the moss to the surrounding hills and mountains.
Hundreds of years ago, Flanders Moss played a vital part in local people’s lives, when it was used for stock grazing or folk were involved in peat clearance and drainage works. But, in the last 150 years, the site has been pretty much closed off to all but a few local people who worked around its edges.
It was, therefore, a big step in 2006 when we put in an all-abilities path and boardwalk to give people open access to a small part of the moss. Locals from the surrounding villages of Kippen, Thornhill, Port of Menteith and Arnprior quickly adopted it as their local walk in an area where there are few waymarked routes to follow. The boardwalk has been excellent at giving folk a close- up view of the colourful tapestry of the bog surface. It’s provided a safe, comfortable way to satisfy people’s curiosity about the moss and to enable arts-based education projects that weren’t possible before.
But the sheer scale of this large site wasn’t visible to visitors, and this made it more difficult to explain the full story of the reserve. Flanders Moss also has a role to play in the local economy, which tends to miss out on the tourist traffic that passes through the villages between Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park and the attractions of Stirling. So we decided to build a viewing tower that would pull in
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more visitors and allow us to interpret the spectacular views across the bog. After a long process, the tower was built by local companies using local Scottish oak, with the help of funding from Forth Valley and Lomond LEADER. The tower and boardwalk have changed the way that people will connect with Flanders Moss in the future. But we were also aware that, in the recent past, the few locals that knew the Moss had looked on it in a very different way. So, alongside the tower project, we’ve been running an oral history project to capture memories of the moss that go back towards the start of the 20th century. People had tales to tell of collecting gull eggs, harvesting sphagnum moss, peat cutting, game shooting and grazing stock. These tales not only make Flanders more interesting to visitors today, but also carry valuable information about how people worked the moss in the past, which can influence how we manage the site in the future.
A second project involved four local schools (both primary and secondary), a nursery school, a playgroup and a local poetry group. They used some of these tales and memories along with their own visits to the moss to record their impressions in words. The schools worked with local poets and a rap artist, and used styles such as ballads, haiku, rap and nursery rhymes. They captured what they think of Flanders Moss on a DVD that’s being distributed locally. In recent times, local people’s views of Flanders Moss have completely changed. Ask people in Thornhill today what they think of Flanders and it would be very different to what they would have said five years ago. We hope the tower will give more people the chance to appreciate the wild, peaceful atmosphere of the moss, which lies just a short trip away for so many people. To find out for yourself what makes Flanders Moss so special, go to the
www.nnr-scotland.org.uk website for further information on the reserve and details of how to get there.
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