Bog Myrtle & Peat

It’s not far along the railway line to Loch Skerrow. There lies the wreckage of an old station stop where the heavy steamers used to pause after their long climb up the Dee valley. Gasping and dry at their labour, the engines braked and had their tanks refilled from the deep, rubbly water of Skerrow itself.

Hardly a station; more like a platform and some hard-worn infrastructure. A few old photographs reveal that there was once a water tower and a master’s cottage; men stand in flat caps and stare at the camera with expressions of surly disgust. Behind them lies a landscape which almost defies imagination in today’s heavily forested Galloway; three scots pine trees above the platform mark an island of industry against shockingly vast horizon. This is the anonymous Galloway of popular understanding – a blank, featureless canvas through which thousands of rail travellers moved without ever touching their feet to the ground. Big men and prostitutes, navvies and parliamentarians slid through these hills without a purl of friction, and every one of them paused for a moment or two at Loch Skerrow.

Beyond these old photographs, it’s hard to conceive an idea of this place as it would’ve been in the days of steam and coal smoke. This railway line was opened in 1864 and closed almost precisely a century later. Abandoned for sixty years, the platform has crumbled like a heap of dominoes. You could walk past the remains of Loch Skerrow Station and hardly realize it. It is only when you begin to poke around in the verges that you discover the roots of a signal box and a line of stumps where the telegraph poles used to stand.

Even in its heyday, the word most commonly associated with this place was “lonely” – Lonely Loch Skerrow, even in local newspapers and journals where no epithet was needed. But that loneliness is relative, for while the place lacked a fizz of trade and industry to call its own, the stop was more than just an opportunity for the trains to catch their breath. Those rails were the only line of communication for that small handful of people who lived and worked in these far-flung hills. So alongside the disinterested bustle of through-traffic, here was a homeline for shepherds and cattlemen; housewives and dykers. I imagine them riding the rails on short trips between Mossdale and Rusko, reeking of moss and marts and the afterscent of gralloch.

Stand in the dregs of Loch Skerrow station and all of this feels like archaeology – guesswork and the rearrangement of old puzzle parts. The station is so far gone as to belong to another era, so it’s startling to recall that my father once rode out here on the train. It was a day trip with his father, travelling from Dalbeattie to fish the hill lochs in the summer of 1963. That is not such a great chasm of elapsed time. What’s more, I happen to know that one of the biggest black grouse leks in Galloway used to take place on the stationmaster’s washing green. I didn’t have to dredge through ancient archives to discover that – I simply asked the man who used to be the station master and he told me himself.

The grandest tingle of this entire landscape – even Galloway itself – lies in the speed of the change that has landed here. The distant moorland places have been reborn as forests in less than half a lifetime, but they are so far gone that even the memory of them is like a dream. It is almost absurd to imagine heavy engines standing in a place where now the loudest sound is a raven’s croak. I am always on the watch for nostalgia – I’m scared that I will end up pining for “the good old days”, but I can justify my ghoulish fascination in these crumbled old platforms because the dust has not yet settled. The railway is dead, but the body is still warm.