The Man in the Moss

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A cold midwinter fogbank lay on the Moss.

            It lay like a quilt on the black mattress of the peat, and nothing moved.

            Not even the village schoolteacher standing on the promontory at the end of a ragged alley of graves where the churchyard seemed to overhang the bog's edge.

            Damp January was clamped across the teacher's mouth and nose like a chloroform pad. He'd only been an hour out of bed, but the cold made him tired and the sight of the Moss only made him feel colder.

            It was, as he'd explained to countless generations of pupils, the biggest surviving peatbog in the North of England, a gross product of violent death and centuries of decay ... vast forests burned and torn down by the barbarian invaders ... soaring greenery slashed and flattened and transformed by time into flat, black acres bounded by the hills and the moors.

            The peat was dead. But, because of its acids, the peat had the power to preserve. Sometimes fragments of the ancient dead were found in there, from iron-hard limbs of trees to the arms and legs of corpses (which were taken away by the villagers and quietly buried).

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