Episode 2: Writing Mud

Award-winning writer Rebecca Stott likes to unearth the overlooked and the forgotten.

While taking a long walk in Sussex to mark the first anniversary of her mother’s death, Rebecca’s focus shifts to the mud all around her. Noticing it for the first time in detail, she sets off on a journey to discover its hidden depths and meanings. She finds herself peeling back layers of literature, culture, science and geology; she discovers the rich literary history of marsh monsters, dips her toes into Darwin’s mud experiments, treads in the footsteps of soldiers in the trenches during World War One and finds out how mud cores extracted from the seabed can shed light on the planet’s past and future.

In Episode 2, Rebecca examines how bogs and mudflats appear as places of mystery and sometimes horror in British literature from as early as Beowulf and later in stories by Susan Hill, Arthur Conan Doyle and J.R.R Tolkein. She discovers how the master poet of mud-writing, Seamus Heaney, found his inspiration in the bogs of Denmark.

Written and narrated by Rebecca Stott
Producer, Lisa Lipman
Editor, Kirsten Lass
Sound engineer and mix, Jon Calver
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4