Bog Myrtle & Peat

I’ve been looking for some rough country to graze my cattle this summer. It’s not easy to find land to farm in Galloway, particularly when you’re a young(ish) person without much money to spend. The best ground is completely beyond my budget, and the poorer land is often bound up in subsidy agreements which mean that the incumbent farmer has a vested interest in keeping it to himself, even if he doesn’t really want to. Most people agree that subsidies have made for a ropey system of agriculture, and it’s one of many reasons why the entire industry feels pathetically fragile in the light of recent political change.

In the midst of moving around my little world, I happened to cross paths with a landowner with common interests. He owns part of a large designated site between New Galloway and Gatehouse of Fleet, and he is keen to find a balance between conservation and agriculture. I have known this place for twenty years, and it always gives me a low hum of excitement to think of it – a place of bog myrtle, stags, eagles and hills which run to the far horizon. From where I am standing, it is the finest crystallisation of Galloway as it has been for centuries; rough, wet and wildly challenging. After a short exchange of mutually overlapping ideas and ambitions, we have made a plan for me to graze my cattle on two hundred acres of this place in the coming summer.

At a stroke, I am suddenly up to my neck in precisely the kind of project I have been looking for over the last ten years. There is so much more on this to come in the next few weeks, but it was worth sharing a note on this new adventure now, if only to mark the start of a project which feels dauntingly vast and thrilling.

There are many difficulties ahead, not least because this place has not been grazed by livestock since 1979. It urgently needs cattle to work on the vegetation and restore many of the natural mechanisms which have gradually petered out and worn away in the last forty years. I love spending time in this place as it is, but it thrills me to think how much more it will have to offer once it is being farmed again.

If nothing else, this project propels me firmly back into the world of black grouse; birds which have become ever more scarce and difficult to know in the time I have been writing this blog. There is a small lek on the land I’m taking on, and it is well linked to other birds in a precarious but persistently stable population in the east of Galloway.

Beyond that, the project gives me a chance to do some actual good. As part of a creeping shift of priorities, I sometimes look up and realise that much of what I do nowadays is based on laptops and surveys and helping other people to conserve the natural world. It’ll be a relief to redress that imbalance with a mixture of mud and sweat.