The idyllic image of rural Irish folk out in the summer sun cutting turf by hand with the sleán, a traditional two-sided spade, is still embedded in the collective Irish memory. Today, however, these days are well and truly gone – the postcard picture of bundled stacks of hand-cut turf has been replaced by uniform rows of wet peat as thousands of years of soil formation is scooped out of the ground in an instance and spooled out by specialist machinery in a modern, mechanised commercial system, left to dry into briquette form. Decades of peat harvesting for domestic turf…

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