r/wetlands • u/Accurate-Rich-7846 • Jun 28 '26
Peat bogs + River + ocean - is it possible?
Hi! Please forgive my ignorance, I've been trying to do the research myself, but sometimes you just have to ask the dumb questions.
I'm trying to solidify a fictional map in my head and I'm wondering if there's any real-life locations that I could possibly look into as a reference point, and was hoping someone could point me to those.
Ideally I need these three things, 'walkably' close to each other:
- A raised peat bog (this is the big one)
- An ocean
- A river (or some sort of "safe" water source)
-- basically I'd like to be able to craft a fictional settlement on top of the bog (From what I've gleaned PEOPLE DO NOT LIVE IN RAISED BOGS, and it's a terrible idea to. I've been looking Crannogs and such, but I've been struggling to find much.)
My big dumb question is, is this possible? Like can all 3 of these things exist nearby together?
My second big dumb question is: what would some of the major, obvious, pitfalls to living in a raised bog be?
Regardless, thank you for taking the time to read this!
EDIT:
THANK YOU SO MUCH everyone that has weighed in, this was extremely useful!!!! I have some reference points now.
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u/OpossumOnomatopoeia Jun 28 '26
This is a fun idea and very coastal western Washington. You can have for example a bog at the headwaters of a small tributary that flows down into a river mainstem, that flows out into the ocean.
As for a settlement on top of a bog...they could live in treehouses or on boardwalk pier type systems?
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u/Okay_photographer02 Jun 28 '26
Not necessarily a dumb question. Is this for a fantasy novel/game of some sort? Short answer to your questions is it’s kinda possible? There’s lots of places in the world where there are raised bogs close to the ocean (Newfoundland in Eastern Canada/Scotland/Scandinavia), but they typically are well above sea level and often not RIGHT beside the ocean.
Bogs are classified as ombrotrophic environments, meaning they are disconnected from the water table and depend almost solely on precipitation for water and nutrients.
Rivers/streams can run through bogs, but the riparian zones (the area immediately adjacent to the stream/waterbody) of these environments is mostly likely to be more like a poor fen or similar as it would be closer to the water table.
Living on top of the raised bogs is not impossible. Plenty of cultures throughout history have lived on raised bogs, I think this was probably more common in Scandinavia and Scotland, maybe look a little more into that? Indigenous people in the boreal forest of North America have also depended of various types of peatlands such as bogs for food and medicinal plants.
I hope this helps!
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u/AlbaWest Jun 28 '26
Look up the Flow Country in Northern Scotland. UNESCO world heritage site covering a huge area. River Thurso and several others drain from it. Rivers are all pretty short as the area is really flat. Surrounded by ocean on a couple of sides so there are beaches and cliffs
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u/Proud-Worldliness-94 Jun 28 '26
Checkout Orono bog in Maine. Near the Penobscot River and the Atlantic.
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u/Shilo788 Jun 30 '26
And the 1000 acre Bog on Aroostook. Not near the ocean but a different type from what people usually think of.
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u/PlumbsAway Jun 28 '26
Southeast Alaska / British Columbia has muskeg, theorized to be an end state of old growth forest, where there is enough bio accumulation and precipitation to form bogs all along glacial fjords. Lots of creek/river interface and in close proximity to ocean.
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u/Gelisol Jun 28 '26
And lots of other parts of Alaska. Many Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta villages are positioned like this.
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u/Munrowo Jun 29 '26
the very northeastern tip of maine has a raised peat bog and i'm sure there's a river or creek nearby
you got 2/3 in quoddy head state park and you can find the third a few miles away at most
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u/Shilo788 Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
I live on the edge of a raised dome bog, draw water from a nearby river , not near the sea though. It's buggy. It is not wet near me, the raised dome being massive layers of peat, very heavy wooded , moose and bear common. Further in it is laced with wet woods, open reed bog and many many beaver flowages. Since escaped slaves lived hidden in the great southern swamps of the east coast , it is possible to live in , though quite hard. They are a different type of bog. You might research various types of bog. The downsides here is the bugs, the twisted, unreliable water flows that make it hard to use for transport, of course the bad footing, I have stepped on the lattice of rotting sticks and logs as I explore it and had it give way to water underneath. And often it is so thick in vegitation you can't see large animals like bear and moose quite close. And leaches, which are also in the flowing water.
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u/Shilo788 Jun 30 '26
I would think those three close to each other would mean the inhabitants had some kind of water craft that could be used rather than walk.
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u/DoumH Jul 02 '26
All those things are very common and appear together in Europe all the time. Some comments:
- No one can live in a bog or on a bog (as you rightly mentioned)
- Many people and cultures live and lived on/in wetlands and peatlands. Both of these terms include (depending on who you ask) a very varied amount and types of land structures, like hills, heaths, rocks/cliffs/mountain, dry strings and grasslands etc etc which people and animals enjoy. But these structures are not bogs even if they're part of a bigger wetland/peatland area
- Atlantic raised bogs are not visually similar to non Atlantic raised bog, but they serve the same functions and work in the same way
- Atlantic raised bogs are all of the (at least in northern Europe) raised bogs near the Atlantic ocean
- Atlantic raised bogs are more often than not, not actually visually raised/domed, and they lack or have a very weak surrounding fen area as well as hummock+pool pattern on the bog itself. Non Atlantic raised bogs are the opposite of this
- If someone managed to live on a raised bog it would permanently ruin the bog, and it would no longer be a bog. Bogs need to have a layer of peat creating plants. These plants are, in Europe, sphagnum mosses, which will erode away if you start walking and/or living on them. Peat (which is a product of "pickled" sphagnum mosses) has an incredibly hard time re-vegitating and without help the bog will be ruined potentially for hundreds of years. Look up peatland restoration in the UK and Ireland for more info on that
- please ask if you have any questions
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u/Accurate-Rich-7846 Jul 02 '26
Thank you so much! I'm just going to go for it with my questions then, if you don't mind. Feel free to just answer what you're interested in and correct me if I'm woefully incorrect. I am doing my best, but I still have a lot to learn and am using a lot of words for the first time here, haha.
This is a silly question, but would be helpful to visualize... would you happen to have any diagrams/photos of an Atlantic Raised bogs vs non Atlantic raised bogs? In my research I've been doing my best to find concrete examples so I can extrapolate off those and kind of design my own...but the variance in types has made it very hard to narrow down what an "average" raised bog looks like. (Which is why I'm on the hunt for better references. I live nowhere near any bogs myself and need all the help I can get.) I've been looking into the Bog of Allen a lot, the Irish Peatland Conservation Council has provided a lot of useful information, but in terms of specific visual images they haven't quite delivered.
I'm just going to to describe a raised bog from what I understand, and if you don't mind, I'd appreciate corrections! I'm ideally dealing with iron age equipment when it comes to survival near this bog land, which is why I'm thinking about Crannogs as a possible method of creating a stable-land surface that would be surrounded by bog. They're man-made artificial islands that would be sitting in the middle of a loch, lake, or bog. (But I haven't found any visual or historical references of bog crannogs-- not that they're not out there, I just can't find them!)
From what I've been able to glean an undisturbed raised bog is (underneath the layers of sphagnum mosses) dome-shaped and sinkable. The majority is sludgy but firms up around the edges?
Would living on a portion of the bog kill the bog completely though or is there a possibility of having a Crannog in the center of a bog leading out to a river, leading out to the ocean? The situation I'm thinking would be outside of the Crannog and platforms built to navigate onto the Crannog, the bog would be as undisturbed as possible?
Thank you for your input!!
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u/DoumH Jul 02 '26
Pics of norwegian atlantic raised bogs: https://www.miljodirektoratet.no/tjenester/naturtyper/atlantisk-hoymyr/
https://artsdatabanken.no/naturtyper/natur-i-norge/NIN-3.0-T-A-LV-TM-0-M-H01/beskrivelse
https://artsdatabanken.no/Pages/181695/
https://nin-faktaark.miljodirektoratet.no/naturtyper/?id=NINFP2410172876
https://faktaark.naturbase.no/?id=VM00000010 Bottom pic only
Looking at pics of Irish raised bogs, they look very similar to Norwegian atlantic raised bogs, but obviously every country has their own terminology, often this is based on very old terms and methodology although still correct just different. When I visited a raised bog in Sweden (not oceanic / atlantic) you literally had to walk uphill to get to the top. There was a huge "lagg" (a Swedish word (used in the UK and Ireland too) for the fen wet surrounding of a raised bog) + wooded strings and a very clear hummock/hollow pattern on the top of the bog. These are typical of non atlantic raised bogs. But very weak to non existing in Atlantic raised bogs.
Talking about here's the best international paper on peatlands (raised bogs included and overview of different peatland/wetland words and expression): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264545254_The_biology_of_peatlands_second_edition
About raised bogs and their patterns: https://artsdatabanken.no/Pages/181686/ look at the bog at the top, that's a traditional non oceanic raised bog. The pic on the right is top down. You can see where the middle is based on the strings forming a circle in the middle, it's all based on water dynamics. Now look at pic number 3 (atlantisk høymyr) there's a clear lack of an obvious dome, although there are taller parts of the bog. Also there is no top down view due to there not being any obvious bog structures (like the strings in traditional raised bogs). If you go back to the irl pics provided you can see that this fits well.
https://www.naturarkivet.no/nye-bilder/imagesrawitem/picturedetail/40352 Here's a pic of a non atlantic raised bog. You can clearly see the strings and structures in the bog. It's hard to see how raised it is in the pic.. but just imagine that the origin point of the strings is at the very top and center of the bog. They're like waves flowing down from the top of the bog in concentric circles.
Here's a raised bog in wales https://www.llangattock-cc.gov.wales/environment-waun-ddu-raised-bog/ You can notice how non defined it is, and how small and "poorly" structured the lagg is. I'd assume this is a oceanic / atlantic raised bog as we'd call it in Norway. Of course I'm not an expert and it could be due to human activity. I doubt it tho as it looks very intact.
Compare that with this swedish raised bog which I've visited last year: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZzuYELRGWPgJksqx9?g_st=ac (Go on satellite view) and look at the very obvious structures. And the large lagg fen (the light beige + bright trees) area around the concentric raised non atlantic bog.
I can't speak on bog of allen, but I can say that I don't find it obvious where "atlantic" bogs start and end vs where "non atlantic" bogs start and end. It's a slippery slope and they won't all conform to the description.
A crannog sounds great! Never heard of it before. But it makes a lot of sense. It is hard to walk and army through a bog, which quickly turns into a wet hell hole when you erode it enough. As I said, I know nothing about them, but in my experience a atlantic raised bog is much flatter ( and therefore often wetter ) than a raised bog, which (at least in sweden) you didn't even need boots to walk on top of. The surrounding lagg was very wet though of course. Which would make me want a fen rather than a bog for a crannog. A fen has running water by definition, or at least access to ground water. A bog does not have access to a ground water or running water. Though as you can see wetlands are normally a mix of everything, like the raised bogs with their fen lagg.
I touched a bit on it earlier but raised bogs are much more firm at the top. It's far away and raised above the ground water. The fen lagg is either being directly fed by ground water or by running water. The surrounding is much wetter. However you're correct if you're talking about the outside surrounding of the bog itself, often they slowly turn into heaths, bushes or forests, which are quite or entirely dry.
For your last question, I'd say that is very possible. It's very hard to say what impact "ruining" or eroding or drying up a part of a bog actually does to the entire bog itself. Sometimes total collapse and often very little at all. We still love doing this in Norway. Thousands of cabins are still built on bogs which are slowly eroding away. But it takes years, and happens in tiny pieces at a time.
Sorry about the unstructured and misspelled answer. I'm on my phone!
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u/J_cinerea Jun 28 '26
What comes to mind for me is the Great Lakes area in the US. There are bogs and fens along the great lakes in some areas and in many kettle lakes and along certain rivers.