Bog Myrtle & Peat

It was so mild that the forecast was becoming a joke. There were no stars at midnight, and the few specks of rain which fell in the dark felt fat and harmless. Predictions of snow were laughable until the first light of morning began to glow weirdly around the bunched corners of the curtains. It was not the promising swell of sunlight reflected from drifted fields, but a sick glow which was more grey than white.

The wind had driven the night’s attempt at snow from the east, leaving black hollows in the bracken above the loch. A dribbling crust of slush had gathered up the windward sides of the rowans and willows, and the spruce branches were bowing under the weight of it. Sagging shreds of snow lay mortally wounded in the twigs like the sordid remains of a parachute that hadn’t done its job. These clumps of suspended ice wept like sodden scabs, leaking juice down the dark tree trunks to pool in the pocks where the stock had been. Even the tattered whisps of cottongrass were encased in a nasty slush, and the sheep had mashed the greying rags of drifted snow into a miserable chowder of peat and semi-solid water.

Up on the hill, nothing moved. The dog and I worked to carve a waving line of footprints which followed an approximation of our usual route around the snares. Creamy yellow fleeces emerged through low cloud, their owners nosing at the rushes, pawing at the snow to reveal whisps of something. Nothing makes a sheep look dirtier than a fresh fall of snow, but something about this latest attempt gave the entire hill an odourless air of filth. The tussocks of grass seemed cracked and half hidden beneath the clumsy ice, while the heads and stems of black heather emerged like the high contrast wreckage of some shocking air disaster.

The sheep wandered through the wasteland like gulls on a landfill site, sifting through the junk with a morbid curiosity. Somehow, a surving red grouse cock spotted me and bawled some obscenity – it was a comfort to hear him speak, but he could have been anywhere in that frothy sea of dripping debris. Where the snow lay thickly, each of my footprints pressed the glossy surface down into the murky lower layers, so that as my boots were lifted I found my prints marked out in mud which bled outwards, infecting the surrounding whitness like an illness. There was none of the curious grinding sound which accompanies a walk in good snow, only a smacking moistness.

Returning to the lower ground, we skirted past some deeper haggs where the unwilling snow had been pushed and left to flounder like some unhappy beetle on its back. Already the cleanest drifts were retreating from the steep peat sides and leaving gaps which dripped and clicked with the sound of moving water below. A snipe stirred from the edge of a drift and turned bleakly into the wind, screeching once before pitching back into the broken greyness two hundred yards further on.

Just before I found the car again, a group of three skylarks passed silently overhead in close formation. A small number of skylarks returned to the Chayne a few days ago, and a cock bird came very close to hanging himself up for a song as the sun reverberated around him on Thursday. He started once or twice like a jumping record, uncertain of which song to choose from his vast repertoire, then landed again a few yards further on. It was an encouraging sign, but seeing those three grimly silent birds today seemed to set the seasons firmly back to winter again.

I understood their shyness as I turned the car in the snow and drove a few hundred yards down to the road – a merlin came slicing over the dyke from my right. She was working the ground, and I followed that focussed, deliberate shape as she pumped her wings and glided low over the trickling slush like a sparrowhawk. I’ve seen skylarks killed by a merlin before, and I wished all of them luck as I drove home down the glen.