A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
turbary
Turbary is the right to cut peat for fuel from a particular piece of ground, and by extension the ground itself. It is a common right, attached to a holding rather than to a person, and it survives in law in parts of Britain and Ireland, where households still cut a bank each spring, dry the sods, and stack them for winter. The cutting face and the stacked turf are among the more recognizable sights on an Irish bog road.
Etymology
The word came into English from Medieval Latin by way of French, built on a root meaning turf or sod. The same root gives turf, which in Ireland means peat as fuel rather than grass, so an Irish speaker asking about the turf is asking about the fire and an English one about the lawn.
Notes
Turbary rights are among the oldest continuously exercised common rights in those islands and appear in medieval charters; disputes about them are still heard. The peat itself is the archive under quaking bog: It preserves pollen, timber, bodies, and offerings, so a cutting face is a section through several thousand years.