Bog Myrtle & Peat

The lapwings which were so heavily trailed on this blog in March have never gone away. I feel sure that three pairs laid eggs and all were washed away in a sudden flood which struck in early April, but they stuck at the job and at least two have tried again. All these birds are… Continue reading

You Hated Spain was published in Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters. It’s a reflection on the poet’s honeymoon in Benidorm with Sylvia Plath in 1956, and it seems like everything that people hate of Hughes is here – the strutting misogynist, the mansplaining boor and the sneering bully. Even the title is an imposition of taste which… Continue reading

There are pools of shade in the rough dehesa, and the holm oaks hunched in galleries of strange, pathetic shapes. You and I might think of oak in vast imperial terms, but these are scrubby robles enanos which operate on a rapid turnover in the rage of an open sun. They’re nothing like our stately trees, and even… Continue reading

Another calf that wouldn’t suck, and I should do away with this cow with her tits like chapel hat pegs. She’s just too big, and her calves find it so hard to suck from her that it wears them down to the bone. They’re keen at first, but with several successive failures, they begin to… Continue reading

It’s hard to imagine that storks could ever lose their novelty. They’re enormous, and the rattling displays which accompany every departure and return of birds from the nest is uproarious. Necks are bent back to unthinkable angles, wings slump deadly down with elation as the beaks are made to snip and clatter like sewing machines.… Continue reading

There are painted shapes in the rocks at Monfragüe, and the faintest ancient smears of human touch. But they’re hardly on display for public edification – you have to clamber up the desperate, jagged cliffs, following a zig-zag track to the foot of a rupture in the rock where the vultures are nesting. Some of… Continue reading

Horses swam in the harbour at Carnlough, and it was raining. A lorry had pulled up on the quay and the animals were being walked on long leads down the slipway to the water. They didn’t want to go in, but a touch from a whip steered them to the flatcalm sea where the rain… Continue reading

There are curlews in the Antrim Glens, and birds which call from the rush-mown upland fields. Seen from rock-tops and the crosses which stand on the summit of Slemish, moorland glides away to the inner workings of Ulster. Beyond Ballymena, there’s a glimpse of Lough Neagh and the gurly rise of the Sperrins and Eire;… Continue reading

“Book-learning is the thing. You’re a lucky man. No stock to feed, no milking times, no tillage Nor blisters on your hand, nor weather worries” These last few mornings I’ve been down to the lambing at dawn in a blend of weathers, from the startling low-light glare of a sun which plays upon the wheatears… Continue reading

It’s hard to draw a line between Donegal and the Dungeon Hills of Galloway. They’re almost interchangeable, and if you love the awful granite wreckage of ice-age mountains, you’d be as happy in one as the other. That’s the point, because the rocks of Ireland and Scotland can be made to overlap in all kinds… Continue reading