My final full day on Skye for this trip with a walk along a vague track through some peat bogs above Sligachan. Peat bogs are dense wetlands filled with partially decayed vegetation. The waterlogged conditions and the bog’s acidity prevents the vegetation from fully decaying when it dies. Instead, it builds up very slowly over thousands of years to become peat. Sometimes the peat can be metres deep. Peatlands or bogs are the world’s largest terrestrial carbon store, capturing more than all of the Earth’s forests combined. The UK’s peatlands currently store more than three billion tonnes of carbon.
