Tread with care

A few miles from home is this damp soggy valley, empurpled in late summer by the heather that thrives on the acidic peat.
Technically it's a 'raised bog' that originated as a sort of glacial sink where melted ice pooled and vegetation grew, decomposed and gradually over time formed a dome of peat. This is an important habitat now for mosses and swamp-loving plants. In times gone by local people would have cut the peaty turves for their fires, as they still so in Ireland, but that traditional fuel was supplanted in Wales by coal.

There is one single path across the bog but even that is waterlogged and in places ankle deep. I'm always reminded of a story by Hans Andersen that deeply disturbed me as a small child. It's called The Girl who Trod on a Loaf. I distinctly remembering my mother reading this to me and some way into it I had to ask her to stop, pretending that I was tired. It was years before I read it through and discovered it to be a revoltingly moralistic and quite sadistic tale. It tells of a girl, Inger, who is by nature cruel and spiteful: she tears the wings of insects and despises her poverty-stricken family. She's taken on as a servant by wealthy folk who indulge her and she adopts airs and graces above her station. One day she's given a loaf of bread to take home as a present for her mother. On the way she crosses a bog and starts to sink in the mud so she puts down the loaf to use as a stepping-stone. But to no avail, she descends into a swampy world ruled over by The Marshwoman whose brewery it is. There Inger is claimed by the Devil's grandmother for a statue: she has to stand rigidly in a slimy hell, tormented by insects and by hunger that she cannot even assuage by reaching down to her soggy bread.

And so it goes on... until she repents, turns into a bird and redeems herself by providing food for others. A thoroughly nasty tale that must have filled a myriad of children with morbid fear and guilt. (It's possible that this story, among others, is mired down by Andersen's own psychological problems; he never completely threw off his own shame about his humble origins, nor did he manage to establish normal sexual relationships with individuals of either gender.)

I'm happy to say I crossed the bog safely, and despite having to play cat-and-mouse with a herd of frisky young cows, I reached safely home where my loaf of bread was waiting to be eaten with the bramble jelly I had made in the morning.

The tale as translated by M.R. James
An alternative version
A revealing biography of Hans Christian Andersen.