Bog Myrtle & Peat

Beltane – Galloway

Rain came to shove us forward, and there’s no going back now. There were two days of cold wind and battering showers, and the grass caught every drop, passing it from hand to hand like an old-time bucketchain. Everything drank, and the wild strawberries burst their buds and guzzled. Then there was blossom and the tree stems audibly sucked the sap from the ground while cuckoos wagged their tails and glared. The hill burns gurgled like babies tickled by the crossing and back-crossing of a fox carting mice home to feed his cubs in the fiddleheads.

Part the grass and find roe kids curled like down with a dance of gnats above them. Roll the stones and stumble upon snake-wrap curled like rizla papers – shreds of cast skin cast thin with even their eyelids dry and empty. Everything came at once until it was hard to draw a line between the warblers and the steady rise of migrant new-come birds; birds on the reseed fields where the tide slides; birds on the burnt-out hill which sorely called for rain and received it too late. There’s a rampant reek of sap and soot, and always a cuckoo between the willows, and always a skylark dinning.

Long before it was fingered by fire dancers and masky droogs, Beltane was a festival of cattle. We only know the shadow of that old festival, but it rose from a world of working beasts and the munch of hill pasture. Cows go out to graze on the first day in May, and Beltane was built to wish them well after a long winter. In some places, cows used to be driven out between two fires to cleanse them of winter’s ill. In others, the beasts were garlanded with yellow flowers to symbolise the motherish lick of flame; ash was smudged upon their polls to remind us all of new beginnings. It’s hard to follow this line nowadays, but it does mean something.

So I look to the hill and the sudden flush of new growth. Sliabh is greening; there are new spears in the old ribbons. The dead yellows of winter are being subverted, but the dry days have delayed this moment – it’s late, and that is no surprise. Beltane has come, but the hill is unready for cows to be turned upon it. It will be another week before my beasts can go out, and while I’m sure that there is some flexibility in ancient calendars, the day is worth marking in itself.

And me? Well, I grin like Grandfer Cantle.