Bog Myrtle & Peat

Winter is a bleak season up on the hill. For months at a time, the only sound is clocking ravens, so it’s a relief to hear the first stirrings of life which would finally indicate that spring is on the way. Up on a bleak, blue smirry hill this evening as the sun was setting somewhere above the clouds, an old familar squeaking rose sharply from the deep rushy pan beneath the farmhouse. A cock and hen snipe were calling to each other – the moss exhaled under my feet and somewhere down by the forest, a barn owl wheezed. Without warning, the gentle throbbing of a drumming bird swept through the misty rain and I was reminded, yet again, of just why I seem to have devoted my life to this project.

I stood in the rain for ten minutes listening to the ghoulish whirr before I realised that it was pitch dark and the walk back to the car over the thick rushes was going to be a test. It’s hard to put the sound into words, but it’s fairly safe to say that, when April comes and you can hear it twenty four hours a day, I’ll be in heaven.