Bog Myrtle & Peat

It rained before the snow came. The place came up dank and scenty, and the ground was thick with dribbling water. I walked on the edge of darkness to see the cattle, and I shoved my way through a mass of livid smells. There was a din from the flowering currant in the yard, then oil and diesel both beading on the tin tank lid. I passed the burn and caught the tang of cold water in a rush of new nettles, and soon I was dodging through mounds of buttery whin pollen and up to the flat, rank batter of cow shit and sugar silage.

They were buried in a swirl of their own breath, and only the calves turned to look as I walked quietly round them. Song thrushes blared from on every knowe like a web of lighthouses, warning me away from the brambles and new rigging of honeysuckle leaves. I stood for a moment and watched a bank of dark clouds teeming down from the north, then I came back to the house where lights made the puddles dance between the granite setts.

I had work to do in Edinburgh the next morning. I was out before dawn to feed the bull and heard curlews calling in the unlit snow. Pairs were singing at the weekend, but now their songs are flat and functional again; contact calls from the winter merse. They’ve fallen out of their pairs into a loose and gangly team as if it were February again – the snow had killed their enthusiasm for this place, and when a fox walked along the rushy pans beside them, he flushed them up in a five-strong swirl. They flew until they were out of sight and the sun peered sickly into the morning like the smudge of blood you find inside an old plaster.

I cradled my coffee and watched the bull pulling oats into himself, then went to catch the train.