Bog Myrtle & Peat

It’s a habit of this blog that I flag the coming of autumn. I mark a day in the first week of August and I note the first breath of a new season. This article from 2016 is a good summary and a fair assessment of how I’ve come to do it, but it’s a trend of several consecutive years.

Now I try to pre-empt that moment with a fortnight to spare. How does the land look in the final days before we descend? I think the answer is brown and thatchy with the stems of seeding grass. A breeze rolls along the hill and stirs a wave which brinks and ponders in the gullies where meadowsweet lies in drifts like forgotten snow. The moor bends away from the high ground, and I peer at the Lake District through thirty miles of blue dust and warmth. The air bowls around my ears and forms a kind of silence. A pipit squeaks.

There are flies stirring eddies in the pollen which hangs around the house. The roadside ragwort nods beneath the grind of fattening caterpillars. And there’s yarrow and harebells and the black serrated spires of seeding nettles; I find bedstraw and the last of the waning orchids. The irises are done and they’ve left us pods like glossy sausages in the bog; thistles reign, and every clump is crowded with bugs and finches and solemn, blundering bees.

For all the bright lights shine upon them in spring, now is a time for black grouse. What better bird to find in the dryness of tall bolted grass than a blackcock, half moulted and dim in the rigging of cobwebs. Of course I love to see those birds at the lek in May with their tails fanned and their wattles raging, but now is a separate moment of familiarity. A crisp smell of sheep piss and lanolin hanging in the rushes like bunting; schools of young and baffled finches along the dyke top; a bull snuffing and straining to be free. And then the sudden crash of a blackcock from under your feet; limber and dull in his mourning weeds.

And he’s up and turning, with the farm below him and the brown, winded hills of home beyond. These are the final hours of summer.