In this episode of the Therapeutic Landscapes podcast, we hear a presentation by Dr Beatrice Jarvis, originally given at the Therapeutic Landscapes conference, exploring the peatlands of Donegal through feminist storytelling, ecological research, somatic practice and questions of care, memory and belonging.
Beatrice begins with a simple invitation: notice your feet, the pressure of your body travelling downwards, and the ground beneath you. From there, she takes us into a landscape where the ground is never entirely still. Water moves, roots move, microbes move, and memory moves.
The bog becomes a way of thinking.
Beatrice asks what changes when we stop treating landscape as backdrop, scenery or resource and begin to approach it as a teacher, an ethical interlocutor and a participant in the making of knowledge.
Her focus is a particular bog in rural Donegal, a place she returns to again and again through walking, listening and embodied encounter. Moving through saturated ground requires attention. Weight has to be negotiated. The body must respond to softness, instability, water and depth. Walking becomes less about travelling efficiently across a landscape and more about learning how to participate within it.
This bodily relationship with the bog forms the foundation for one of the central ideas in the presentation: care as restraint.
The peatland holds because it does not rush. Organic material accumulates slowly. Decay is delayed. Water is retained. Bodies, wood and histories may remain suspended for centuries. Through this ecology of holding, Beatrice asks whether the bog might teach us something about patience, limits and the ethics of knowing when to intervene and when to leave something alone.
The talk moves between ecology, folklore, trauma studies, feminist posthuman thinking, poetic writing and encounters with people who have worked the bog over generations.
Beatrice shares about a turf cutter whose knowledge of the land exists in the body: in hands, knees, balance, repetition and the ability to recognise when the bog needs rest. This knowledge is not abstract. It has been learned through years of contact with peat, weather and seasonal rhythms.
That relationship complicates simple narratives of either exploitation or conservation. The bog is also a working landscape, and Beatrice is interested in the forms of knowledge that emerge through sustained relationship with it.
Throughout the presentation, she returns to the bog as an archive.
It preserves archaeological bodies, ecological histories, cultural memory, grief and the material effects of human activity, but it does not necessarily reveal them in an orderly sequence. Its memory is layered rather than linear.
This becomes particularly significant in Beatrice’s exploration of trauma.
She considers parallels between the way the bog holds material in suspension and the ways experiences may remain within bodies without becoming coherent stories. The bog does not demand immediate disclosure. It allows things to remain partially hidden, unresolved or inaccessible.
From this emerges an ethics of opacity: the possibility that something does not have to become completely visible, explainable or narratively resolved in order to matter.
That idea challenges many of the rhythms that shape contemporary life.
We are accustomed to speed, productivity, clarity and immediate answers. Landscapes are expected to provide resources. Stories are expected to arrive at conclusions. Healing is often imagined as a decisive moment in which something is understood, released or repaired.
The bog works differently.
Beatrice describes healing instead as something closer to sedimentation: a gradual restoration of relational capacity through repeated encounters with safety, attention and participation.
This model does not promise a dramatic cure, but suggests something slower, a way that healing may take place through accompaniment, through repeated acts of attention, and through rediscovering our capacity to participate in a world larger than ourselves.
Her embodied scores extend this invitation to the listener. Stand until the body settles. Allow the ground to shape the step. Notice changes in balance, temperature and muscle. When words begin to appear, resist the urge to immediately turn sensation into explanation.
Stay with what is unfinished.
The bog resists the demand to be made immediately useful or completely understood.
It asks for another tempo.
A slower way of knowing.
A willingness to listen before naming.
A capacity to remain with uncertainty.
And a recognition that human beings enter ecological conversations that began long before us and will continue long after us.
Towards the end of the talk, Beatrice asks a question that has accompanied her throughout her years of walking the Donegal peatlands:
What does the land ask of us?
The question shifts our attention away from what a landscape can provide and towards the responsibilities that come through relationship with it.
The bog does not offer an easy answer, instead, it offers scale, companionship, perspective and practice.
It reminds us that some things must be approached slowly, that some stories arrive through silence, and that care can sometimes mean resisting the urge to extract, explain or resolve.
Perhaps most importantly, it asks us to remember that we are participants within the living world. And in a time shaped by ecological uncertainty, grief, acceleration and disconnection, Beatrice suggests that remembering how to belong may itself be a radical form of knowledge.
Bio
Dr Beatrice Jarvis is a choreographer, somatic practitioner, and interdisciplinary researcher whose work is grounded in an attentive relationship with land, body, and the more-than-human world. She is Course Leader for BA Dance and Senior Lecturer at Kingston School of Art, where she cultivates pedagogies rooted in embodiment, listening, and ethical presence.
Her practice-based PhD explored somatic movement in post-conflict landscapes, and her AHRC-funded MA at Center for Community and Urban Research ( CUCR, Goldsmiths) integrated choreography, spatial inquiry, and ecological thought. Her research has been presented internationally, including at dOCUMENTA (13) and Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Beatrice publishes on somatic ecology, maternal embodiment, Gaelic language and land, and choreography as a practice of care.
She is completing certification as a TRE® practitioner, extending her work into trauma-aware facilitation. Across her practice, movement operates as a mode of ecological listening, shared responsibility, and reverent response within uncertain planetary conditions.
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