New story on Atlas Obscura: How an Irish Bog Got a Second Life

There are many opportunities to visit a bog while traveling in Ireland, but it is an experience that many travelers miss while they are on the Emerald Isle. One of the most visited bogs, that receives 100,000 guests every year, is actually no longer a bog. It is a sculpture park, and before that a peat mine. Its days as a bog are a distant memory, but an important memory for visitors to engage with as they wander Lough Boora Discovery Park’s newly vegetated trails.

On June 6, I published an environmental history of this former raised bog as a travel story with Atlas Obscura. The story begins:

“In the middle of Ireland, about halfway between Dublin and Galway, a large rusting, yellow train sits on a track. Its engine is hooked to six cars and a tea hut caboose, dented from their years of hauling fuel that was sliced out of bogs. During their life as industrial mining equipment in the 1950s, the train cars were piled with carbon-rich black peat soil for the Irish company Bord na Móna. The tea hut caboose is where the company’s rail line workers took their break and had a drink. But that was back when this park was an actively mined peatland.

Seventeen years ago, the train found its final resting place and is now called the “sky train” by visitors who see it as they enter Lough Boora Discovery Park’s sculpture trail. Today, opportunities to birdwatch, fish, walk, and cycle along more than 20 miles of trails dotted with dozens of sculptures brings 100,000 visitors to Lough Boora Discovery Park each year. The history of Lough Boora Discovery Park before its days of art and trails provides an interesting lens into a part of Ireland’s landscape that has deeply shaped the Irish people and way of life: bogs.”

Read the full story here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/where-is-lough-boora-discovery-park