Bog Myrtle & Peat

Lamping in the summer has to be one of the best parts of my project so far. I’m not a mad keen lamping enthusiast like some gamekeepers, but I do like the chance to look at the farm after dark when a different selection of birds and mammals takes to the stage. I’ve recently been very conscious of the need to lamp more intensively as chicks start to appear, and while it’s often a drag to head off onto the hill after a day’s work, the effort is alway repaid, even without bringing Charlie Fox to book.

Using the torch to sift through galaxies of sheep and lamb eyes, I occasionally stumble upon the thrilling hard spark of a fox. There really can be no mistaking that spine tingling flash when the lamp passes over a fox at any range, and the shape of the reflected eyelight has an unnatural effect on me. Looking through a ‘scope, a close range fox appears to trickle through the long grass, with delicate legs and feet buried in the deep grass. When he turns to look at you, his uncanny eyes blaze back the lamp light and obscure his entire head, leaving only the tips of his ears and the silver sheen of his throat and neck visible.

To fill the long walking gaps between foxes, snipe drum overhead as a fat moon hauls itself up over the Solway. By day, you can see more than forty miles in every direction from the top of the Chayne, but at night it is shimmering darkness. There is no orange light neon glow anywhere on the horizon; in fact, there no sign of civilization whatsoever. Here and there, a farm will sparkle an indoor light until eleven or twelve at night, then it will also be swamped and swallowed in the dark. By one or two o’clock in the morning, the whole world is black, and it’s a thrill to walk alone in the knowledge that the nearest human is more than three miles away.

Barn owls tack back and forth above the rising grasses while the faint and half heard buzz of a nightjar oozes ambiguously up from the forest below. All the while, bats flicker impatiently overhead, and the swollen moss exhales underfoot.

Maybe the reason that I am not very good at lamping is because I’m thinking about so many other things when I carry my rifle onto the moor on a summer’s evening.