Bog Myrtle & Peat

It’s difficult to know what the pigs thought of their final days. They had been born in April, and could hardly be expected to understand the meaning of frost.

In its heyday, their pen had been a wonderland of meadowsweet and flag iris, and the piggies had run in curly loops beneath the flowers, their eyes rolled back and their ears akimbo. They had camped outdoors in the half-light of midsummer’s night, rolling their snores across the yard while the sun obligingly dropped below the horizon for an hour or two. Swallows and martins had rushed over their heads in a reeling kaleidoscope of sound and colour, and the pigs had been part of it all. Their bodies laid down fat for the winter, but their minds were focused solely on the moment. Of course we loved them.

The march of autumn and the perpetual grind of their snouts had reduced this paradise to mud. The ground became mush, and the pigs grew surly and short tempered. Exploratory nuzzles became sharp and painful; the beasts were settling in for winter as mature, well-grown animals. They lost their sense of humour and became vehicles for protein and fat. The impish darlings of high summer had gone, but it was still hard to face the reality of what might come next.

Their carcasses were instantly unfamiliar. The life rushed out of them and took everything we knew and loved. Despite their klutzy, fumbling charm, our pigs were just pork. Toasting their memory, we drank whisky and lifted the cold shapes onto tables in the yard. Steel blades stripped them down into pieces. A weak autumnal sun lit up our work as skeins of geese passed high overhead, moving south and Solway-bound.

Vats of steaming water were brought to soften the same bristles we had scratched and patted. A brutally sharp knife scraped away the hair and revealed leathery skin beneath. They had been saddlebacks, but the black pigment came away with the hair like damp crepe paper, leaving the bodies pink and uniform. Joints were dismantled, and contours were pared into tidy bunches of muscle. The bones themselves were startlingly white –porcelain shapes in a seething mass of meat. I looked up at the sunset as evening fell and heard wintry fieldfares calling on the moss – my hands were sticky with the season’s fat.

We worked on the carcasses for a day, dividing them into less recognizable parts. These were hung on hooks, and soon it was hard to tell what had been where. We began to process these parts as the temperature dropped and the cold nights chilled the fat into firm, workable layers. This is why pigs are killed in the autumn; here was the meaning of frost.

The bacon cured in vats of sugar and salt. Hams hung from the rafters while we brewed up brines and cures which were mixed with juniper and peppercorns. Bags of apples came in from the trees and hung by the kitchen until the house smelled sweet and pure. Soon there were links of sausages and bowls of waxy brawn cooling in the shed.

I mourned the pigs, but this sadness was balanced by the pressing necessity for work – it’s no mean feat to preserve one hundred and twenty kilograms of meat. We could have done more – we could have split the toes and scraped the tails; a thousand little chores to eke out every last blob of fat and gelatin. These are the old-fashioned ways, but we focused on what was doable. Chops, hams, hocks and bacon. There is still a good deal of work to do, but there is an undeniable joy in chores which are tied to the seasons. There is no “Friday at 5pm” deadline in this job; pigs should be killed when the cold weather comes and the meat should be stowed for the dark days of winter. There is a binding relevance to that simple fact.

I rejoiced in September to bring in the hay – I sat with my family in the half light and drank cider beneath a wall of our own dried grass. The rain was coming, but we had stolen a dry day so that the cattle could be fed. If that moment had been joy, the death of the pigs was an equivalent and unavoidable sorrow. Peaks and troughs like these drive our roots into the landscape – we become more than mere bystanders.

It is easy to ignore the weather and the seasons; modern man is always warm, fed and comfortable. I am grateful to the pigs for that pull on the thread; the reminder that life is always moving; a constant blend of boom and bust; joy and tragedy.