Bog Myrtle & Peat

This blog is a labour of love. I love my subject and I love writing about it.

I am often surprised and delighted to find that hundreds of people visit Working for Grouse every day, but I try and treat this as a bonus. I would still be writing this blog even if it had no readers, and the huge majority of my writing still lies unedited and unloved in notebooks and hard drives across my office – perhaps it will lie there forever. At the same time, there are plans afoot to compile aspects of this blog into a book; a project which I hope to work on this winter…

I get a fair amount of feedback from regular readers via email, and many have become good friends over the years – this is a real bonus, and I adamantly believe that online contact is nothing when compared to direct meeting and face-to-face discussion. I’ve taken many a pint with readers of this blog, and while not all “meetings” have been vastly constructive, conversations which revolve around moorlands, farming and wild birds are invariably fascinating. Of course it’s not always possible to meet people, and digital interaction has been a decent second best.

Having wrangled with the software, this blog now allows a more engaging means of leaving comments and feedback, and I also run accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram which tie into my my daily doings and enable discussion. Some of these accounts are simply fuelled by photographs of my cattle or links to sites of interest, but they all allow for a greater degree of connectivity. With all these (newly available) channels of communication, please feel free to contact me, even if it’s just to correct an error or point out an inaccuracy – it’s fun to hear from people who have taken time to read my output, and perhaps your comments and input can help to steer this project.

After seven years, I have a feeling that Working for Grouse is only just getting started.