Bog Myrtle & Peat

I’ve been away for the last week. Not only away from this blog, but also travelling around Scotland as part of a series of events for the Soil Association. We held three meetings for farmers and crofters in Galashiels, Ardgay and Skye, and the days were focused on rush control and livestock grazing. I worked hard to make sure that a move towards agricultural improvement was balanced with conservation interests, and it was reassuring to be reminded that farmers have a grand appetite for conservation. It was also good to catch up with a number of people who visit this blog now and again, and I chewed the fat with several likeminded folk.

But the enduring gut-punch was the simple fact of being away. For all I loved the events and the people I met, leaving this place lay heavily on my shoulders. I fell to a kind of mourning which tugged and ground at me in the evenings and at the first few minutes of day. I’ve become absorbed into this farm, and now it comes as a dull ache to be away from it.

Part of me rails against this introversion, which feels petty and childish. I’ve lived for months away from Galloway, and I learned how to handle homesickness as a teenager. There’s no good reason for me to dread the world, and I studied my gloom with curiosity. I worried that it’s the product of comfort and idleness, but then I remembered the edgy brightness of this place which piles fascination upon intrigue with every passing day. I don’t want to leave because Galloway is streaming into me and I’m gripped by the continuity of it.

But I have to balance that devotion with the need to be away. Now I work a day a week in Edinburgh, and I took that new job because it was fresh and unsettling. Displacement is healthy, and I had to be shaken. I draw huge benefits from my day in the city, but I begin to gape and wheeze like a landed fish by five o’clock when the train recovers me from Haymarket station. I come home and cradle this place all the dearer for my absence.

I returned home on Friday night after the tiny course of a week. I spent Saturday gazing at the sky and the rush of cool colour on the hills with fresh wonder. I’d passed through some of the finest and most celebrated landscapes in Scotland, but they paled by comparison to this blunt, fameless corner between the hills and the sea.