Bog Myrtle & Peat

The Galloway Hills lie like a fallen dyke below the setting sun. I look to them across fifteen miles of open moorland. They’re rough and round and boulder blue.

Despite their name, half of these hills lie in Ayrshire. It hardly matters where the county line’s drawn because there’s nothing to administrate or record in that grand mass of rock and water. Nobody cares, but the line needs to run somewhere and so it glides along a twisted list of trails and crumbled cairns. The warden of the march is a knuckled old fox who cocks his leg on every milepost and never misses a trick.

Walk in those hills and tingle at their cosmic, fearsome loneliness. It’s a manless void to shame the racket of busy lowland farms, but there was a time when folk tried to find warmth in this back country. Shepherds scraped their lives off the broken stone and went for months without seeing another soul, but now the hills are owned by the Forestry Commission. There’s no call for sheep these days, and wind hisses through the tall spruce trees like sand in a timer.

Listen to the rush of water in the falls and the birl of the myrtle stems; there are goats calling. Half-seen at a mile’s distance, they trip along the granite stacks and creep below the overhangs. We owned them once, but they’ve been living wild for seven centuries. Even after all this time, there’s still a nagging humanity in those dumb, slit-black eyes. You’ll find shreds of bone and a tooth or two below the crags where the youngsters play. They fall and die as if they’d never been, and the old billies remember a time when we were as tough as they are now.

Goats aren’t the only markers of mankind. There are names and tales which hang on every cliff and lochan in these hills. Some names are hardly words at all; just rasping sounds which root back to the old tongues. Even without meaning, these words carry a fitting sense of place; picture Clashdaan, Meeowl or the Snibe on a black winter’s night and you won’t be far from the truth. Even more recent English names hint at a sinister twilight world; the Dungeon, the Murder Hole, the Wolf Slock. It’s a home for cannibals and animals with little to offer decent, forward-facing folk like you and me.

My father showed me this place. We all inherit that wreckage of granite and bog myrtle from the people who’ve gone before us. He and I tramped across the high hills and fished together on hidden waters, casting lines through a watery broth of stone and rowan trees. Many of these lochans are merely tumblers of peaty water cradling a shadow of the sky, but fine, tiny trout lurk behind every boulder, and loons wail beneath low cloud. We were just passing through because there’s no lasting life for anybody there. Sometimes at night you’ll see a light from a forester’s caravan, but there’s hardly a hearth in plastic walls and caravans have wheels to rescue them when the weather turns.

These hills have become ownerless, flung far beyond the hand of man, but they’re always peering over our shoulders. I see those old familiar lines when I look up from my beasts or peer along the bonnet of my tractor. They’ve seen me rise and grow in this place, and they’ll see me slump back into again. They stand beyond me, and I know them as well as I can.