Turbary as the right to cut peat — and as the peat bog itself from which cutting takes place — connects poetry to the specific landscape and traditional economy of boggy, treeless uplands where peat was the only available fuel; Seamus Heaney's bog poems are deeply engaged with the turbary landscape — the cut-over bog, the ancient peat workings, the layers of preserved time that the peat cutter's spade exposes; A poet might write "the turbary gave up its fuel reluctantly, each sod cut and lifted a small act of removal from the deep archive of the bog, the black peat smoking with ancient summers in the autumn hearth"; In poems about common rights and their loss, turbary appears alongside pannage and estovers as one of the customary rights that gave the rural poor access to essential resources — the right to cut fuel from the bog a lifeline for communities in treeless upland landscapes; The temporal depth of the peat bog — its layers representing thousands of years of accumulated vegetation — gives turbary a geological dimension: to cut peat is to use an ancient resource formed long before any human claim on the land existed; In contemporary ecological verse, the turbary landscape is mourned: the peat bogs drained and converted to agricultural land, the ancient archive of the bog destroyed for short-term productivity, the community of bog species — sundew, bog asphodel, cotton-grass — lost with the wet ground that supported them.