ABSTRACT
The careful and systematic exploitation of physical resources is an important characteristic of peasant societies. Few natural assets are wasted or left unused, and every attempt is made to achieve at least a measure of local self-sufficiency in one segment or other of the economy. The use of local building materials perhaps illustrates this characteristic in its most obvious form: so many houses and cottages built entirely of local materials survive in the countryside. But many other rather peripheral activities exploiting the environment with a similar thoroughness have left less permanent traces, and it requires an effort of the imagination to realize their former significance. The cutting of peat or turf is one such activity. 1 Once extensively found in Wales it has left but few visible and identifiable vestiges. The natural erosion of peat surfaces tends to conceal or disguise the disused turbaries of the past, especially in upland areas. Lower down the slopes, the intermittent process of agricultural improvement over a period of centuries, which gathered momentum in the late eighteenth century, has similarly destroyed the old peat banks and pits. Many former turbaries are now fertile meadows and have been such for more than a century. Furthermore, because the cutting of fuel was largely a subsistence activity involving no financial transaction, it is not often recorded in old farming accounts. Yet, despite this paucity of evidence of various kinds, there can be no doubt that the task of ensuring an adequate supply of firing for the winter months was of cardinal importance in the peasant economy and that the problems it created exercised the mind and the ingenuity of the Welsh countryman. In this paper it is proposed to examine the extent of peat-cutting in Wales in the past and the relationship between the exploitation of peat and the use of alternative fuels.
