Bog Myrtle & Peat

Lockdown lifts, and the returning world feels subtly new. Galloway has always been a calm and forgotten corner of the country, but now we’re on the move. Quiet places have become extraordinarily busy; I pass convoys of campervans and cyclists as I move back and forth to my cattle. A new density of people has come in the same noisy vein as wintering geese.

I’m used to a feeling of complete isolation in this place, and yet in a dozen unrelated moments during the last month, I’ve stumbled upon ramblers, cyclists and recreational visitors. I don’t resent their company, but it’s worth recording the novelty. And a massive holiday complex has sprung up beside my hayfield where the oystercatchers nest. Instead of listening to waders along the foreshore, the last eight weeks have been dominated by the sound of hydraulic peckers breaking stone to make gravel driveways and a crazy golf course. There’s been fly-tipping, wildfires and livestock trailing through gates which hang open because there are no signs to say Keep Closed because we’re not used to this here.

Many of these changes are so small and disparate that marking them in isolation seems oddly petty. Joining the dots feels like pig-headed nimbyism, and yet a neighbour told me that so many people now camp in the layby below his farm that he’s taken to locking his door at night. He removes the keys from his truck when it’s parked in the yard. He doesn’t know how to talk about these things, because he understands that he is finally losing something that most people lost years ago. He has lived in Galloway for sixty eight years, never imagining that a stranger might walk into his house without an invitation. I wonder if it’s possible to mark the loss of that quiet trust without sounding like a hick. But it’s 2021; it’s time for us to get real – and it seems like reality includes a statutory dose of anxiety, disappointment and suspicion.

All the while, I hear from friends that the housing market is blowing through the roof. Buyers are paying over the odds for a rural retreat in Galloway, and many are making offers without even seeing the properties they hope to buy. There’s a torrent of money boiling in the falls, and suddenly my pals are being priced out by developers and second-home-owners from Liverpool and Preston. It’s easy to read the scale of this change as a threat, but estate agents grin and say “that’s The Market”, as if it were some elemental force and somehow more than the accumulative acts of many individuated human beings.

So go ahead; you’re entitled to buy as many houses as you want, even if that means that others will go without. And if you catch yourself feeling queasy about that as you lie in one of your beds at night, rest assured that if you hadn’t done it, someone else would. We’re all part of this, so nobody’s to blame; The Market absolves you, and I hope you find what you’re looking for in the terms and conditions of your consumer rights.

Rural communities die without development and progress, and I know that Galloway needs a boost. I fight the urge to complain, but it’s worth noting that many of the people who come here do so for the sense of calm and character which defines life in the southwest. Other places have lost that old-fashioned steadiness, which is the sum of a hundred nameless quirks contributing to a sense of something special. It’s ironic that even as we’re drawn towards that peace, we extinguish it. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe we really want second homes or sensational profit margins anyway. These are just stand-ins for the ability to close your eyes and breathe easily. I make no exclusive claim on spiritual clarity, but there have been times when I have joined the dots and found some real peace and realised that it has nothing to do with what you own. But I also know it’s hard to keep that horse between your knees.

So I stand back and watch this oddness flow in over the horizon. Who am I to whine, but in the rising tide, there’s a transfer of emphasis, because “oddness” is relative and the word can only be applied to a minority. I cuss and labour in the face of these changes, appalled by the idea that homes can be traded and bartered like bits of a board game, but I can’t avoid the fact that we’re long past the tipping point. I’m the oddness now.