Bog Myrtle & Peat

Low Airie, Glenkens – 4/5/20

I took the hill on the condition that I would be responsible for making it stockproof. It seemed a small job at first, but soon it grew and expanded into a monster. I was faced with a mile and a half of fence to restore (including 947 posts), and almost two miles of crumbly old drystane dyke to rebuild. I expected this to be a challenge, but I couldn’t have guessed how it would try me.

To avoid desperation, I forced myself to ignore the enormity of the task, focussing instead upon breaking the marathon into series of smaller sprints. I gave myself a list of manageably sized goals, each one shuttered off from the scary scale of the whole. Of course it helped that every trip to the hill was a pleasure, and I was forever led astray by blackgame and the glimpse of pine martens. The wildfire was a major distraction, even though for a time I feared that all my work would shortly go up in smoke. But the fence was saved from incineration and I soon became so good at working step-by-step that I was horrified to find that I had finished.

I tied off the final section of electric wire, looked up and was pleased only for having completed that small task. It took a moment to realise that everything was done; six weeks of work completed. Bent in blinkered concentration, I had almost forgotten that I was planning to bring cattle to this place. The end goal (which had seemed like a dream in March) now stood plump and easily reached before me.

So the beasts will go out on Wednesday, and in some very small way I can pick up on the many threads which led me here. An ecologist came to survey the ground at Low Airie, and she declared that the land was in a very poor state. Tasked with building an inventory of botanical biodiversity, she returned to her car after a three hour walk and could hardly disguise her disappointment. The white grass is so thick and the bracken so heavily set that very little has survived forty years without grazing. She found a few interesting plants to mark the hill’s potential (of which more to come), but her verdict was that Low Airie has suffered badly during its time without grazing.

It’s tempting to overstate the significance of this project and the goals I’ve set myself, but I already feel like I have the chance to do something really good here. When they heard that I was taking on Low Airie, my friends and neighbours said that I would never get the place ready for livestock. It’s fun to replay that dismissal to them now that it’s done. But I am under no illusion that the next steps will be any easier. Managing livestock in a badly dilapidated piece of moorland is going to be every bit as difficult as all the work I’ve done so far. However, I’m still tantalised by the realisation that everything is impossible until somebody does it.