Bog Myrtle & Peat

I’m not sure what “Southern Uplands” are, or whether those words are a useful way to describe something that shouldn’t bear a single name. I know my home and I know Dumfriesshire less well. My knowledge of the Borders diminishes with distance so that Hawick’s familiar and Kelso’s another world, but there’s far more to this thrownaway skelp of Scotland than meets the eye. And it’s only in these last few years spent working in Lanarkshire and sometimes in the Moorfoots that I’ve started to get a sense of how these many and varied parts lock together in a sense that’s far more interesting than the lazy, nothing-to-see-here articulation of Southern Uplands.

Can you believe that I was thirty before I knew the name of Tinto? I’d never been to Stobo or Spango until recently, and Horseupcleugh was just a funny word until December. But now I’ve started filling in the blanks, and standing for the first time on the shoulder of Gathersnow Hill at Coulter, I found yet another undiscovered enormity of countryside I never knew existed. For a start I was amazed by how much of this land is heather hill and free of trees. From the high ground in Galloway, I’m used to the sight of conifer blocks like a chequerboard to the far horizon, but many of these Border-Lanarkshire hills are bare or black with heather as they would have been when my grandfather farmed nearby in the 1930s. It was a reminder that the scale of Galloway’s problems are unique to herself, and I should be more cautious when I attempt to pronounce on behalf of southern hills when really I mean my own.

But I also learned how closely all these famous catchments lie in a swirl like a red and white peppermint together in the sun. In the late afternoon to the tune of skylarks, I could see the Clyde rise and turn away towards the city; the Tweed come toiling out from a cleft in the hills; a flash of the Forth and south to the Annan, the Nith and the Esk all working down in parallel bands towards the Solway. From a height you can see how it all might lie together, clear in a sense that’s superhuman.

My perspective was altered when I read Wendell Berry’s vision of water reversed upon itself so that it does not fall from the land but rises from the sea in a mess of grasping arteries like a silver net. So I felt that if I could only lift up a handful of sodden moss at my feet at the summit of Gathersnow Hill, the whole and interlocking fabric of water in multiple catchments would be taughtened like a rug and all those threads would twitch themselves as far as the distant coast.

I’ve set myself too big a task to know this single part of Scotland, but I’ve already gone too far to give up. And now I’m more cautious than ever about folk who claim to speak on behalf of more than they’ve seen with their own eyes.