The Mythos of the Peatland Archive
The west coast of Britain was once covered in a vast temperate rainforest. 6000 years of human extraction have all but eliminated them, leaving behind a scarred landscape. People have gone, villages built and razed, all in the blink of an eye of geological time. But peer into the peat bogs, and you will find a record of memories past- the slowed decomposition of organic matter has created a deep soily archive below the surface. Various societies around the British Isles have long regarded the peatlands with a certain mythos, a realm of mystique and intrigue; the land of spirits and portals to the underworld. In a sense, it’s true- the peatland are portals from present to past, from an ephemeral world to an atemporal one. Yet they are continually destroyed- dug up or drained for fuel and ‘useful’ land, constituting not only a disaster for climate and ecology but an erasure of a record. Simultaneously on the floating surface, much of rural Britain faces a depopulating landscape, aging towns that may soon be forgotten.
The Mythos of the Peatland Archive proposes breaking apart an asphalt car park in Cleator, Cumbria; remediating the landscape into peatland, constructing a ‘village of restoration’ and opening a portal to a subterranean archive. Invoking the mythologies and folklore of the British wetlands, the project is diegetically presented retrospectively as a fairy tale told after Cleator’s managed decline. It follows its inception from a band of restoration nomads, its construction from paludicultural material, its use in community ritual, and finally its decay back into the landscape that birthed it. In the centre of the village lies the columbarium, a subterranean cemetery of objects where nomads archive away their artefacts, grandiose and banal, unobtrusively inscribing their legacy into the peatland. In all states, the village becomes a machine that archives rural memory. After a century, a human lifetime and a millisecond for Earth, all that remains will be fields of reed and typha, dotted by remnant archives below the ground, sinking deeper into time.
