Bog Myrtle & Peat

Long-weathered readers of Working for Grouse will know that I am eternally tickled by the parochial and arcane. Despite my best efforts, I continue to amass a grand collection of objects which relate to local history and wildlife, and my office becomes ever-more laden with wondrous “findings” and curios every year.

And so you will easily grasp how staggered I was to uncover two “new” artefacts which fell into my lap this morning as if their uncovering had been preordained.

Creeping up the bottom of long-dry burn shortly before sunrise, I imagined myself as far from any nudge of humanity as was geographically possible. This was black grouse country, ten miles North of Gatehouse of Fleet and a fair step to the nearest piece of tarmac. I’d been lulled far away from my work by the bubble and hiss of a fine blackcock, and taking a bearing from the wind and the sway of scanty birches, I dropped down over a burn-bank and began to stalk towards the sound in the icy stillness of dawn. It was easy work to creep along the bed of that steep, trenchy burn, but soon it broadened and left me dangerously exposed. Blackgame are surprisingly vigilant birds, and I didn’t want to disturb anything without good reason at a sensitive time of year – I merely wanted to see how the morning was playing out for the fan-tailed wonder, and so I dropped down on all fours and began to wiggle on my belly over rocks and the dregs of scorchingly cold peat water. I was glad of the recent dry weather then; this burn runs deep and briskly after a wet night.

Lunging and wheezing my way up the river bed, I finally came close enough to see the blackcock in question, almost three hundred yards uphill and completely obsessed with his own affairs. Shuffling round for a better look, I found myself staring into a black, hollow glass tube jutting out of the burn-bottom just inches from my face.

Perhaps I labour the point, but it’s hard to overstate the remoteness of that place – not just “a bit of a quiet spot”, but the kind of landscape where months could pass without even a distant glimpse of another human being. Yet here was what seemed to be a bottle, sitting upright in the pooly grit. I lifted it up and found that it was not only intact, but also bore the trademark of the Dumfries brewer “Bryson” of Midsteeple Dumfries. I didn’t realise it at the time, but these bottles were standard fare in the 1930s – I knew I’d found something old and rather special, but this relic had been discarded almost ninety years ago by somebody who probably thought it would vanish forever.

Baffled (and thrilled) beyond all reckoning, I crouched over my “find” and realised that it had been lying beside a peculiar white shell. That also warranted a closer look, and I soon recognised a badly worn but instantly recognisable object of similar intrigue and perhaps even greater delight; it was an otter’s skull, complete with five molars.

There is an otter’s skull in the museum at Kirkcudbright – I used to draw pictures of it when I was a kid, and there was no doubting the identity of what I’d found. Perhaps most strikingly, you could’ve walked this burn a thousand times and never found either of these gems, which had been stranded here together for who-knows-how-long, waiting to be discovered or shatter and be lost. It seemed a near miracle that they should align just inches from my face in a quiet moment before daylight.

And so I have more to add to my miscellany, alongside a growing sense that there is far more in these hills than ever meets the casual glance. Of course I hugged myself with glee to the tune of that gaudy old blackcock, but I had found more to please me in the mouldy remains of an old burn-bottom than any shopping mall or marketplace on the planet.