Bog Bothy – A New Peatlands Architecture, 2023 – 2025
Bog Bothy works with peatland communities to create bog bothies as spaces for shelter, retreat and deep engagement with this changing landscape.
As Ireland moves away from industrial and domestic peat extraction, and is creating new plans for outdoor recreation infrastructure, these sustainable and creative architectural interventions will pilot new ways of maintaining historic connections with the bog, while protecting and sustaining it for future generations.
Ireland’s peatlands are a cultural landscape. This project has sought to identify and document historic and contemporary human interventions in the bog. This process classified a vernacular architecture of the bog to inform the bothy’s construction. In parallel, a community consultation and practical research process identified the most sensitive way of constructing the bothy and placing it in the landscape, working with community designers from peatland communities, drawing on their skills and experience, and in cooperation with larger stakeholders.
The project culminated in ‘Bog Bothy Tour’ in Summer 2025, with the peatlands communities of Clara, Co. Offaly and Girley Co Meath hosting the bothy on their bog, with a public programme of cultural and environmental awareness events.
Bog Bothy is a partnership between the Irish Architecture Foundation and 12th Field. It is part of the Creative Climate Action II – Agents for Change programme funded by Creative Ireland.
Reimagine Cloontuskert, Irish Architecture Foundation Reimagine project series 2021-22
Reimagine Cloontuskert was an eighteen month engagement with the former Bord na Móna village of Cloontuskert, Co. Roscommon. With the recent cessation of the industrial peat extraction industry, this small community has found itself at the centre of a massive shift in national and global climate change policy. We worked with the Cloontuskert residents to co-create a new vision for their village and surrounding landscape, seeking to celebrate both its rich industrial heritage and forge a new path into a sustainable future.
The village was designed by the architect Frank Gibney to house Bord na Móna workers in the 1950s and the project started out by looking at Gibney’s vision to seek inspiration for the sustainable development of the village and its peatlands setting in this post-industrial era.
Together with the community, we explored new avenues to investigate how the re-use/re-purposing of abandoned industrial infrastructure could work in parallel with wider local and national plans for active tourism in the peatland landscape. We compiled our work into a Community Masterplan which was presented to the community at the end of the project.
Read our Reimagine Cloontuskert Community Masterplan here
Reimagine-Cloontuskert-Community-Masterplan
Rewetting and rewilding the peatlands will create a changed landscape, with enhanced opportunities for inhabitation and interaction. New connections will be formed, old connections will be restored.
Reimagine Cloontuskert was one of three projects forming part of Workers’ Villages, an Irish Architecture Foundation programme funded by Creative Ireland’s Climate Action Fund, working alongside our project partners Pure Designs and Global Action Plan.