Such phenomena have occurred infrequently within recorded history, usually after a period of inordinately heavy rainfall when the surface layer of vegetation becomes too weak to retain the liquefied mass of peat beneath.
Several minor bog-slides have been reported in recent decades. After a midsummer thunderstorm in 1963, a peat- slide affected a large area of Meldon Hill bog in the Northern Pennines, leaving two scars in the blanket peat about 230 metres long and 36 metres wide.
Many centuries earlier but closer to the site of our own disaster was the eruption of Chat Moss, near Manchester, which Leland, an historian in the reign of Henry VIII, records as having 'brast up and destroied much grounds and much fresche water fische therabowt and so carried stinking water into the Mersey and carried the roulling mosse to the shores of Wales, part to the Isle of Man and sum into Ireland.'
One cannot but suspect a certain exaggeration in this account. But those of us who experienced the horror of that night, those who lost friends or loved ones or only their homes will carry with them to their own graves the smell, the texture and, for some, the very taste of the black and ancient vegetable matter we call peat.
From Dawber's Secret Book of Bridelow (unpublished):
A TALL ORDER, owd lad.
To try and unearth the truth from the Black. To make sense out of what happened. To consider whether my beloved Bridelow has a future. And, if so, what kind.
I thought at first to put it off until after the official Government inquiry, from which there'll obviously be a report for public scrutiny. However, that's not likely to emerge for months, and when it does it's bound to be a dry Civil Service document full of scientific guff and a list of safety recommendations for communities which happen to be situated on the edge of large, unstable peatbogs.
'Ernie,' you said, 'you're the only man who can put all this into any sort of human and historical perspective. You must get it down while it's fresh. Before it becomes part of Bridelow Mythology.'
What you really meant was. While you're still with us, Ernie.
'And who'll read it, owd lad?'
'Let's hope,' you said sadly, 'that nobody outside of Bridelow will ever have to.'
So I'm writing this in your study at the Rectory while you're up at the church, conducting your first evensong since the Burst. Thanks to your charity, I've been sleeping (whenever the Lord permits it) in the little spare room it the top of the house.
Emergency accommodation. My own house, exposed up by the school, being one of the first destroyed.
Seemed, when it was happening, like Armageddon: most of what we knew and loved engulfed by a dreadful destructive force ... perhaps the merciless anger of the Lord, which we had brought upon ourselves by clinging to our primitive Christian paganism while all those around us (them Across the Moss) had long since been converted and embraced the Light.
Embraced the light? Don't make me laugh. There's more black out there than you'll find in Bridelow even now, under its dark blanket of peat.
Peat preserves.
The Moss preserved the ancient dead and two millennia of fear, violence, sickness and dread. And other things of which we do not speak, of which we cannot speak. Of which Matt Castle, all those years ago, could not speak, only let it pour away, out of the pipes, as he wandered in his agony upon the Moss.
It has absorbed all our overflowing emotions, this Moss, like a gigantic psychic cesspit. It has preserved and it has neutralized. An archaic chemical cathartic.
Ignore me, Hans, I'm getting too deep. Or too whimsy, as Ma Wagstaff would sometimes rebuke me, poor owd lass.
Avoiding getting to the simple physical horror of it.
Thousands of tons of the filthy stuff. Liquefied peat. Stink? I don't think I'll ever get rid of it from the back of my throat. And certainly not from the back of my thoughts. Not as long as I breathe.
Cowering in the choir stalls, we could hear it descending all around the church, still hearing the echo of that cataclysmic thunderclap in aftershocks of rumbling and roaring, and we thought the church would implode, the walls collapse in upon us with a shattering shower of stained glass.
But the church held. The makeshift Autumn Cross swayed and rustled, the lights went out and came on again, bar the one above the door, but the church held.
More than my house did. Reason it went: it was on the wrong side of the street. The first explosion, the actual burst, sent the fountaining filth hundreds of feet into the air ... why, bits of it were found on the moor, five or six miles away.
But when it settled into a mere tidal wave - a bit, they say, like the tip slide which killed all those poor kids in South Wales - it was the buildings on the west side of the street that took it: the Post Office, the chip shop, Bibby's General Stores (poor old Gus Bibby couldn't have known a thing; his flat over the shop was filled up in seconds with liquid peat as dark and evil-looking as the comfrey oil in one of Ma Wagstaff's jars).
Naturally, The Man I'th Moss, the most westerly building in the village, on the very edge of the bog, is now under a great morass of muck. Selling it won't be a problem for Lottie Castle now; just a question of collecting the insurance, more than enough for a semi in Wilmslow.
At least thirty people died in the village that night; how many were simply victims of the Bog Burst may never be established. Which is, you will agree, just as well.
Quite a few are believed to have perished instantly out on the Moss, although, again, an exact number will probably never be known. Perhaps, over hundreds of years, the bodies will be disinterred, perfectly preserved no doubt, like our Man. Museum pieces - although perhaps not, because the Burst will be part of recorded history, so people will understand.
Or will they? Do any of us, even now, know precisely what happened, or why?
Except for Dr Roger Hall, who was seen by his assistant, Mrs White, to be heading for the Moss a short time before the Burst, most of those who died out there, in conditions which recall what I've read of the black horrors of the Somme, will remain unidentified. Many were likely to have been men and women long estranged from their families or disowned by their relatives because of the unacceptable practices in which they indulged themselves.
I know very little about so-called 'satanism', whether this is simply a convenient name we have given to those who seek personal power over others through supposedly supernatural means. Whether, as some say, they sacrificed newborn babies out on the moor in order to 'reconsecrate' the stone circle, I certainly don't know that. I do not want to know.