Country Life
EVERYONE who has ever crossed a marsh or a bog knows the smell of marsh gas, the ferment of organic matter that comes from the ground at the pressure of the foot. I had always associated the smell with the rising of water- birds, the tracery of footprints on the black earth and those buried logs called bog oak, but even although I had half an idea that the gas was methane or something like the gas miners know as fire damp, it did not often come to my mind that it is a gas that can be ignited when its concentration is sufficient. Now that the Government arc to survey for natural gas in order to save coal I wonder about the usefulness of the places I so often explored in my childhood when the curlew and other moorbirds were nesting. A geologist friend informs me that, although the gas exists in places where there are great deposits of peat, in his view the productive sources will be the " wastes " or disused workings of coal mines where fire damp builds up in the galleries. I like to think that, nevertheless, some use could be made of the bogs and moors that abound in the country and that one day, even if marsh gas cannot be driven off the peat and piped away, someone might make a proposition of shipping peat to London where it seems that on a foggy night it will soon be quite impossible to distinguish between a working surgeon and a house- painter on his way home.
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