The Flow Country

Thoughts of a bog might conjure sodden plains. But in the far north of Scotland known as The Flow Country, fans celebrate the bog as a tapestry of 9,000 years of accumulated flora and reflective pools that support herds of red deer, attract migrating birds, and sequester carbon. In the Highland counties of Caithness and Sutherland, Flow Country recently earned UNESCO World Heritage status—joining the ranks of the Grand Canyon and the Great Barrier Reef—as Europe’s largest blanket bog, so named for its consistent coverage of more than 462,000 rolling, largely treeless acres, estimated to store 400 million tons of carbon. The campaign to preserve the bog kicked off in the 1980s after logging operations drained and disturbed it. Now a tourism campaign is poised to supplant the extraction economy and further protect the region. Hiking trails take visitors into the world of resilient sphagnum mosses and to an observation platform in the modernist Flows Lookout Tower framing panoramas over the peatlands. During spring and early summer, nature lovers will catch flowering bog-bean and wading birds like the common greenshank on the waterways. Birders will find golden plover breeding in the range. And come fall, bog plants turn red and brown, a colorful backdrop to the trumpeting of rutting stags.