Aoife Mulcahy keeps a hand-drawn map of Bellanaboy Bog on the wall above her desk in a one-room office in Crossmolina, County Mayo.
The map is updated every quarter in coloured pencil. Areas shaded green are owned outright by Bog Trust West, the charity she has worked for since 2022. Areas in yellow are under negotiation. The areas in red, which still cover most of the western half of the bog, belong to people the trust has not yet approached.
Bellanaboy is a raised bog of about 312 hectares, formed over roughly eight thousand years on the flat hinterland between the Nephin Beg range and the Atlantic coast. It is one of the few remaining intact raised bogs on the Irish west coast and is designated as a Special Area of Conservation.
Despite the designation, large portions of the bog remain in active turf-cutting use. Under Irish law, turbary rights, the right to cut peat for domestic fuel, are a form of property that can be held independently of the underlying land and can be sold, inherited, or extinguished only with the holder's consent.
There are, according to the trust's current count, 87 individual turbary rights holders associated with Bellanaboy. Some live in nearby villages. Others live in Dublin, Galway, or Manchester, having inherited the rights from a grandparent and never visited the bog itself.
Mulcahy's job is to find them, contact them, and negotiate purchase of the rights at a price the trust can afford. The current rate the trust offers is 4,200 euros per acre of cutting bank, which is below the open-market value but is, she says, what most holders will accept when the alternative is doing the cutting themselves.
Between 2022 and 2026, the trust has bought out 31 holders, covering roughly 47 hectares of cutting bank. The work is funded by a combination of a Heritage Council grant, private donations, and a single bequest from a Galway dentist who died in 2023 and left the trust 280,000 euros.
Once a cutting bank has been acquired, the next step is rewetting. The trust contracts a small bog-restoration firm based in Athlone to install peat dams and plastic sheet piling along the drainage ditches that have, over decades of cutting, lowered the bog's water table by an average of forty centimeters.
The dams are simple structures, a meter or two long, set every twenty to forty meters along a ditch. They are built into the existing peat and are intended to slow rather than completely block drainage, which produces a more stable rewetting trajectory than complete blockage.
The science behind the approach is well established. The Peatlands Programme at the National Parks and Wildlife Service has published a series of protocols based on a decade of work in the Irish midlands, and the Bellanaboy project follows them closely.
What is harder than the engineering is the social work. Turf-cutting is a deeply rooted practice in west Mayo, associated with household memory and seasonal rhythm. Several of the holders Mulcahy has approached have refused to sell at any price.
She does not press. The trust's protocol is to make a single written offer, follow up with one phone call if there is no response, and then close the file for at least three years before reapproaching.
Some files have been closed and reopened twice. One holder, a farmer in his eighties who lives in a stone bungalow on the southern edge of the bog, sold his rights to the trust in February 2026 after declining the offer in 2022 and 2024.
He explained, when he signed the contract, that his sons had told him they would not be cutting after he was gone, and that the rights would otherwise pass to no one in particular.
Mulcahy keeps a copy of the contract in a metal filing cabinet next to her desk, in a folder labeled with the holder's name and the relevant ordnance survey grid reference.
The bog itself, where the rewetting has been done, is beginning to respond. A 2025 vegetation survey by a botanist from the Atlantic Technological University recorded the return of sphagnum hummocks in three of the seven monitored blocks, along with bog cotton, sundew, and the occasional reappearance of greater bladderwort in the wetter swales.
The recovery is slow. A raised bog that has been cut and drained for fifty years does not return to active peat-forming function within a decade. The trust's planning horizon is fifty years, which Mulcahy has occasionally been asked whether she finds discouraging.
Her answer, generally, is that the timeline is the timeline, and that the question of whether she will personally see the bog at maturity is not a relevant input to the day's decisions.
The map on her wall, updated this week, shows a small new patch of green at the southwestern corner. The patch is 1.8 hectares. The next yellow area, slightly to the north of it, has been in negotiation for fourteen months.
