This is a magical place where you can experience the incredible sights and sounds of Scotland's natural world.
Here you can see an amazing range of wildlife and landscapes, including many rare species and habitats of international importance.
This is a relic of what must have been one of the largest lowland bog areas in Britain. The rest was reclaimed for farming during the 18th century. Situated in the Carse of Stirling, it's a bogland of great beauty with its colourful sphagnum mosses and varied birdlife.
Flanders Moss is a remarkable survivor. It is a remnant of the huge Forth Valley boglands that once stretched from Aberfoyle to beyond Stirling. This ancient gem now forms the largest intact raised bog left in Britain, home to many scarce plants, birds and insects. And within its treasure chest of peat lies evidence for thousands of years of change in landscape, wildlife and human culture.
They form immense domes of peat, with a living skin of plants. Amazingly, water can form up to 98 per cent of the bog! These domes began to form thousands of years ago, after the last Ice Age, in lowland hollows that once held lake plantlife.
‘Sphagnum’ mosses power the upward growth of a raised bog, slowly adding layer upon layer and forming the bulk of the plant material in the peat. Several sphagnum species grow on Flanders Moss, creating a colourful patchwork of emerald, amber, tawny and claret.
These mosses soak up water like a sponge and grow upwards from their tips, leaving the lower, shaded parts to die. Gradually, this material forms peat, adding less than a needle-width 1mm a year to the bog height. That’s enough though, as over thousands of years, this has piled peat over seven metres deep on Flanders.
Raised bogs form when they no longer rely on incoming groundwater and are fed purely by rainwater. Flanders Moss reached that lofty position thousands of years ago, and its rare size and quality have led to it being nominated as one of the European Union’s ‘Special Areas of Conservation’.
Natural survivors
Adders and mountain hares are two of the larger creatures that thrive on the bog year-round, while thousands of migrant pink-footed geese from Iceland and the Arctic roost on the Moss lochan over winter. Look out too for the hen harriers that hunt here in winter.
For flowering plants, the all-swamping moss and high water levels can make life tricky here at any season. Cranberries and bog rosemary are among a fairly small bunch of plants found on raised bogs. Tough, fast-growing shoots help them to avoid being totally swamped by the growth of saturated moss around them.
Bog Myrtle is another resident and some say its strong smell clears hangovers. This could have been useful a couple of hundred years ago when whisky was distilled locally at Kippen and Thornhill. Its leaves are an important food for caterpillars of the Rannoch brindled beauty, an uncommon moth that survives on the Moss.
Other notable wildlife includes a rare species of jumping spider that leaps on its prey; flesh-eating sundews that use sticky hairs to trap small insects on their leaves; a host of weird and wonderful dragonflies; and hundreds of large heath butterflies that appear in mid-summer to feed on the fluffy, white flowered cotton grasses.
Continue around the boardwalk and to the tower for an additional two caches.