Bog Myrtle & Peat

In my line of work, progress comes with such ponderous slowness that I am rarely satisfied by it. Unless you take stock and raise a pint now and then, it’s easy to forget that you’ve made any headway at all.

Gathering, sorting and loading three beasts into a trailer today, I looked up and found that I was engaged in complex, challenging work. And there was nobody to help me; and I hardly cared about that absence. I used depend upon friends and family members to walk me through even the simplest tasks – now I realise that I can do most things on my own. Of course there will always be some chores which require an extra pair of hands, but it’s a fair boost of confidence to realise that I have come to think nothing of jobs which used to overwhelm me.

And bigger still, there’s a good reason why I gathered those beasts and loaded them up in the bright and watery sunshine. One of my first riggit cows had a bull calf this year, and he’s just about perfect. He’s thick and blocky in the shoulders, and there’s a fine blue smudge around his lugs which simply makes me smile. There’s a fair margin for personal preference when it comes to riggits, but in following my own taste, I think this calf is as good as I’ll get. However, there’s small demand for riggit galloways in the modern world, and only a handful of bulls are sold each year. It costs a great deal to raise a bull if you aren’t sure that you’ll be able to sell him. In a normal year, he would’ve been castrated by now as a matter of course. It wouldn’t have mattered that he shows style and promise – he’d have been earmarked for the abattoir.

But this boy has found a buyer; a farmer in Northumberland who’s looking to set up a herd of his own hill cattle.

That’s a fine, prestigious endorsement. A bull is more than half your herd, so to have a stranger come and buy an animal you’ve bred? – well, that’s getting near to being an honour. The deal was done in August, and I’ve enjoyed seeing the boy grow on towards maturity. His brothers were castrated on a bright day in October (on which perhaps more to come), but the bull calf was kept back and allowed to remain intact. He’s been given the name “adder“, and once that’s been approved by the Riggit Galloway Cattle Society, he’ll go down as the first pedigree beast I’ve bred and registered.

Adder will head to his new home in February, and then I’ll get to follow his progress from afar. I know that he’ll make a handsome beast, and I’ve started to think of him as a spark flung from my project to start a fire elsewhere. I find that very satisfying indeed.

So I loaded him into the trailer with his father and brought them both home after a long summer; back to the sheds and the in-bye fields where I can cosset them both and oversee their progress into the winter. I want to be proud of that calf when he goes. For all that he shows promise, there is still work to do; and when he proves to be a success, I hope we’ll share it together.

So I look up and realise that as weeks and months glide past without celebration or comment, there is plenty to be proud of.