Bog Myrtle & Peat

In the chaos of moving house and trying to get married in October, I finally found my camera four months after losing it. Flicking back through the pictures, I found that the memory card was housing all the lost photographs I took during the weeks either side of Easter weekend this spring, and many of the pictures took me straight back to a particular trip to the Galloway/Carrick border, where for two nights I slept on the sofa in a wooden fishing hut and got up before dawn to hunt out lekking blackcock.

One lek in particular sticks in my memory as one of the most extraordinary black grouse spectacles I have ever seen, and I thought it was worth revisiting it in photo-form here. September carries with it all the excitement of young birds and the spectacle of blackcock on the rushes and rowans, but it is hard to forget the delight of a frosty April morning.