Bog Myrtle & Peat

The fire rolled and gathered pace greedily. It turned and was bolder in a shifting wind; it ate the land as if there was no more of it to come and every stick had to be taken at once. Smoke rose to be seen in Cumbria and the Inner Hebrides, and the flames broke the darkness of two nights. At last it shrank into green fields and was harried out from the trees by men and helicopters. Having eaten everything that was eatable, it slumped and was done.

Then there was a stillness which consumed all sound. I spoke and my voice was flat and the echo of my boots was lost in the whumping ash-mat which sprawled across six square miles. I went alone to the high ground and stared down across Grobdale and Culreoch where the wind played games on the ruined hill. Twisters rose a hundred feet high to die and leave bent columns of soot standing foolish in the sunshine. A swirl of the breeze came near and hissed like an adder and fragments of moss like shot linen rose and landed again somewhere new. Stones which had lain for decades beneath grass and myrtle lifted their heads and breathed again; clean and fresh as the rubbledump from a withered glacier.

A grouse stood and blinked in the blackness, with his breeks a mess and his brain deep-fried. I saw a mountain hare; the first to be seen on this hill for twenty years or more. He ran and the rush of his running threw soot in his tail. He’d have to run a long way to leave this mess behind him.

And there were cauterised caterpillars, and frazzled lizards curly as the hair which fried on my forearms; pipit nests with all the eggs gone hard and the shells split and the white in bubbles like meringue. Deer had crossed in the dawn, and now they milled along the forest edge with black bellies and the stags among them stumped.

Silence, and a gentle intake of breath. There will be no rain for days to come, but rain is the only remedy for a place that has been rocked back on its heels.