An Cosantóir

An Cosantóir March 2019 www.dfmagazine.ie 26 | Joe Price is one of the co-founders of the "Living to Learn" Bushcraft Community, a member of the Irish Bushcraft Club and you can follow the community online: facebook.com/groups/livingtolearn/ SPHAGNUM MOSS FOR S phagnum moss has been used since the early 1900s as a way of effecting comfort and first aid. It made its way into the mili- tary theatre when the demand for dressings exceeded supply. Doctors at the Royal College of Surgeons noticed that soldiers were dying from sepsis at an alarming rate. Cotton been in such a high demand for not just dressings but uniforms and its recent discovery in the use of explosives. Enter sphagnum moss or peat moss. The humble plant grows in abundance in Ireland and in similar climates. It was first noted by a Scottish botanist first that Gaelic warriors in the battle of Clontarf used moss to stuff their wounds. Sphagnum moss when shook free of debris can hold 22% of its weight in water. Far more than cotton. This is because 90% of the cells in sphagnum moss are dead to allow the plant to absorb any moisture it can. Thus, making it ideal for soaking up blood and pus. To prepare moss for dressings you simply shake it free from large debris and dry it out as best you can. Either leaving it in the sun, by a fire or curing it in a billy can. This is a great modern technique for keeping burns or dry areas cool. Take a piece of moss and shake the debris off it, and wrap it in a shemagh or bandanna you can apply it to infected areas. You can either wet it for dry wounds or leave it dry if you have a wound that needs an absorbent dressing. But make sure to always have some barrier between you and the sphagnum moss. As the war raged on, the number of bandages needed skyrock- eted, and sphagnum moss provided the raw material for more and more of them. In 1916, the Canadian Red Cross Society in Ontario provided over 1 million dressings, nearly 2 million compresses and 1 million pads for wounded soldiers in Europe, using moss collected from British Columbia, Nova Scotia and other swampy, coastal regions. By 1918 more than 2 million dressings were being sent out. In December 1916 an Irish war hospital supply depot was set up in 40 Merrion Square, Dublin. Here volunteer women made dress- ings and bandages, such as papier-mâché surgical applications and sphagnum moss dressings. Owing to the war, one of the first items to become scarce was cotton wool. Sphagnum moss proved a good substitute because of its excellent absorp- tion properties. Some women spent many a cold winter's afternoon gathering moss from bogs in the Dublin Mountains. The moss was sterilised, dried and sent to sub-depots throughout Ireland. The central depot for sphagnum moss collection in Dublin was the Royal College of Sci- ence in Merrion Street (now the Department of An Taoiseach). So, the credentials of this amazing plant found abundant throughout Europe goes without saying. But first aid isn't all sphag- num moss can be used for. It also makes great bedding. Not when placed directly on because of its moisture when fresh, but luckily sphagnum is easily torn in huge sheets from the ground and it can be placed on the ground to pad out the underneath of a tent's floor, placed into black bags for a mattress or simply stuffed into a dry bag for use as a pillow. If cold, dry moss can be stuffed into a sleeping bag liner and used as an insulator in cold weather under a coat or padding for cold kidneys. Some literature says it makes a great water filter for filtering sediment but I wouldn't recommend this. A shemagh or bandana will have more filtration effect and in many cases using natural materials to filter water can in fact make it dirtier. But these are just some of the uses of this amazing plant used during the great wars. Between 1911-1919 Ireland's Red Cross had managed to collect and prepare from the bogs of the Dublin and Wicklow mountains enough material to send nearly a million dressings to theatres of war around the globe. It truly is an amaz- ing plant for survival and one of the few plants found abundantly across the island. BY JOE PRICE

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