Bog Myrtle & Peat

When you travel at a tractor’s pace with two tons of split beech in the trailer, you can’t help but pay greater attention to the roadside fields and the slow sun turning overhead. I’m used to this route downstream from the moors to the bay, but I usually see it from the window of a truck rushing at dykeheight to get the work all done. Sit three feet higher and travel at half the speed and suddenly it’s hard to tell if the world was always full of such detail and all it took was time to see it.

These final days of March are often filled with whooper swans moving en masse at extreme height up the Dee or out into Clydesdale. Before the riot of migrants begins, these birds fill a gap and please me more than I can tell you against the rising moon. And all that time I sat in the tractor’s din, they passed me overhead as the shadows grew longer and each bump in the road settled the new logs down like porridge in a sack for the most efficient use of all available space. When I set off from the hill, the logs were mounded high and wobbling. After three miles across potholes and cattlegrids, the stack was flat and packed level across so tight you’d almost need the pinch to break them up when you got there.

Sitting high, I saw hares in the fields and lapwings busy in the reeds. Then up around the cairns, there were buzzards and ravens in the shimmering sky and that cold, abrasive light that only comes with an east wind at the end of winter. A bumblebee joined for me for a time; a butterfly landed in the road in my wake. 

I usually drive a big blue truck along this road, and people are free to wave or ignore me as they choose. It’s a distinctive vehicle, but slip inside a borrowed Ford tractor and even your best friend can hardly make head nor tail of you. I watched my neighbour squinting into the cab, trying to see who was driving. I made to wave, but instead the sun’s reflection flashed on the glass cab and left him wondering. Then at the loch-head I came down amongst a parked up arrangement of shepherds. I’d usually stay for a chat, but I find it hard to restart this tractor when it stops, so I blew by and yelled and they failed to decipher me. One of them waved for fear of not waving, but the others doled out that expression of quiet disgust kept ready behind glass to be broken in case of intruders.

I thought back to a night last summer when I rode this route on my bicycle after work. I went to turn the peats and saw everything from a different angle; the same route rendered unrecognisable by a different pace and perspective. The boys had been making hay in the glen that day, and I could smell each field differently as I passed alongside it, with the grit crackling under my tyres and the weight of my dinner in a bag on my back. At one bend, I came upon a covey of young grouse on the road, dusting themselves in the sunset; birds I would never have seen at full stretch in a truck. And I thought again of that soft illicit joy you feel on arriving announced in a place you know so well, lacking any of your normal precedents and catching it all off guard so the very hill itself seems to sit up in surprise saying “now where did you come from?”