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Our future is peat (2024), community-engagement workshop, Insh Marshes & Ruthven Barracks, Scotland.
Our future is peat was a creative engagement workshop developed in collaboration with RE-PEAT and Historic Environment Scotland, presented as part of the IUCN UK Peatland Programme’s Peatlands, People and Nature conference in Aviemore, Scotland. The workshop was informed by a set of peatland-themed questions posed by primary school children from Wood Farm Primary School in Oxford – questions that became the conceptual starting point for the activities.
Set against the backdrop of Insh Marshes, participants were invited to explore the site through three interlinked creative exercises:
01. Deep Listening – attuning to the sounds of the peatland and performing as “human hydrophones”, translating sonic impressions into embodied gestures and responses.
02. Mark Mapping – tracing the textures, patterns, and impressions of the marsh through responsive drawing, capturing both physical detail and emotional resonance.
03. Layered Embodiment – embodying the many layers of the peat through freeze-frame postures, connecting physically to the bog’s depth, history, and ecology.
These activities encouraged participants to temporarily set aside human vocabulary, to move out of purely analytical thinking, and to immerse themselves in the sensory, embodied, and relational experience of the peatland. The workshop culminated with participants writing responses to the original questions from the primary school children—closing the loop between the curiosity of young learners and the lived, multi-sensory experiences of those present on the marsh.
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The workshop was framed by a series of prompts designed to draw connections between questioning, values, and lived experience:
–– Our values develop throughout our lives, beginning in childhood. Hearing the questions of
children invites us to reflect on where and how our own values – particularly our valuing of peatlands – first took root.
–– Questions act as moments of relation to the peatland, revealing what is important to an individual or group at a particular time, in a particular context, or at a particular life stage.
–– The questions we ask of peatland ecosystems are shaped directly by what we value. This workshop traced those values through three angles – history, deep sensing, and childhood – in order to map the diverse ways in which people relate to Insh Marshes.
–– Over the long life of a bog, people have related to it differently, in part because of changes in what they value. At Ruthven Barracks, a historic site cared for by Historic Environment Scotland, we used both the building’s history and peatland folklore to think back through time and consider how questions about Insh Marshes may have shifted over centuries.
–– Before questions can be asked, they must first be listened for. At Insh Marshes, deep listening became a way of opening ourselves to new kinds of questions – ones that arise when we step into a more embodied, less human-centred way of engaging with the bog.
By weaving together the curiosity of children, the sensory immersion of deep listening, and the layered perspectives of history, the workshop offered a space to reflect on how our questions, and the values they reveal, evolve over time.