We were driven to make this book by what we saw as a general disconnection from peatland. The belief that moors and bogs are bleak, empty places leaves them profoundly vulnerable to development by commercial extraction, housing, farming, industry, energy infrastructure, munitions, hunting … . The anthology would be our way of countering this misconception; of letting people know that peat holds life, water, carbon, history – and if we look after it, it will hold our future as well.

Like the bog itself, our writing selves don’t do well with containment. The categories are loose, the themes overlap and reiterate. Peatlands are a transitional landscape, soft and shifting; a mosaic of ecosystems; a wealth of biodiversity. In their depth and fluidity, they reject binaries and boundaries. They offer us a model of diversity and interdependence, a reminder that whatever maps and categories we may erect – sex and gender, riverbanks and woodland, genre and chapter – are temporary, contingent and inadequate.

Bogs are endlessly varied, and the same is true of the writing in the Book of Bogs. Peat is full of living things, including stories. There are stories of scientific study and archaeological discovery; stories in fact and fiction; of myth and imagining; in poetry, in memoir and essay. There are stories of Brontës and birds, moss; grief and recovery; oppression and restoration. Stories of corruption and hope; from Walshaw Moor to the peatlands of Papua New Guinea and many, many more.

When you read the book you’ll learn about peatlands, but most of it, you will feel them. You’ll sense them and see them – the glow of moss, black water, the sweep of an open moor. Cottongrass, the clutch of mud. The smoked whisky smell of peat burning, the choked air of a burning moor. You’ll hear the curlew and lapwing, the sudden alarm of grouse. You’ll feel the earth, dark with history and myth. You’ll see yourself reflected there, in beauty and loss and hope.