Bog Myrtle & Peat

Rain after long, dry weeks. It pools on the mud and sogs in the fallen bracken like a thickness.

I was out at dawn last week and heard the undergrowth crackling to the tune of fox cubs. They played in silence, but the dryness made it noisy. Now it’s damp and I’ll have no sound to guide me under the willows where the violets creep. The rascals will slip away in a veil of sap and softness, and all I’ll find is a cooling mess of broken fiddleheads to show me where they’ve been.

Away from the woods, the turnip drills are black with the heft of fallen water, and oystercatchers have come to dab between the ridges. We needed this rain, and soon there’ll be new turnip plants stacked and thriving in long queues across the field.

There are cattle over the dyke where the bog cotton droops in cloddy balls. The beasts are silvered with dew, and they hardly look up when I go to check them. But it’s time for a reshuffle; animals to move between holdings at opposite ends of the same parish. We load them into the pens and listen to slittery gush of shite and piss as they turn and roll their eyes. This is a numbers game; it doesn’t matter which animals we move, but I’ve got wishlist all the same. I line them up as I’d choose them to go, but they refuse to run up the race into the trailer. We’re forced to rotate them round and soon there are volunteers at last; not the beasts I would’ve chosen, but there’s no harm done. You can’t prove a point with cattle, and you’ve got to work with what they give you. Then we can bring the sliding gates in behind them, and soon the trailer’s raking off the blossom from the low-slung boughs above the road.

And all the while there’s a cuckoo somewhere on the edge of seeing; a half-cock shape on a telegraph pole or at the bending tip of a rowan tree. He’s trailing his wings and stirring the rain with his tail, saying “here’s your summer – be sure and make the most of it”.