Bog Myrtle & Peat

In the autumn when the going was better than it is now, I sent my sheep across the river to get them in lamb. In an uncharacteristic moment of madness, my neighbour had bought a fancy Ryeland tup which looked like a teddy bear, and he was already regretting the decision. He thought it was daft and I stoked that flame by undermining him. For a game, I badgered him to let that tup have a go at my ewes, hoping that I’d get some funny-looking lambs in the spring. He rolled his eyes and conceded, but the tup’s first night of work proved to be his last and they found it dead in a corner of the field the next day. It made for a joke if nothing better, and my neighbour cursed the error of his ways. He’d never buy anything so foolish as a Ryeland tup again. My ewes went in with their normal texel tup on the marsh fields and that was that.

It happened that my neighbour took ill and died soon after that. It was a shock to everyone, and we all miss him sorely in the glen. My ewes came home and spent the winter fattening on hay I cut with that man, and I thought of him often and the time we might have spent teasing one another about things we each thought the other had done wrong. Already in 2022 I’ve often felt the lack of him on chores we would’ve done together in a spring I cannot take for granted. When I came to clean my turnip seeder, I choked to find new bolts he used to replace the old ones when he borrowed it last year. 

And I wish there was some way to tell him that one of my ewes had twin lambs to that Ryeland tup on Friday last week, proving that the animal’s one night of work had not been in vain. My neighbour would’ve cracked himself laughing at that. And he’d spit fire at God’s irony that the only person to get any pleasure from that Ryeland tup was the damn boy from across the river, and By Christ there would have been some mileage in that for me. I would’ve offered to sell him back his own lambs, and he’d have said that I was speaking too soon, and it doesn’t matter how good the seed is, only rubbish grows on my ground.

Then last night on the edge of darkness and the red rim of an afterglow in the north, I stood and watched my little black lambs playing away from their mother for the first time. There’s even something eldritch about those funny-headed mongrels in broad daylight, but this scene was total silence and dusk; the smell of new grass and lanolin on dry soil as the pair of them dashed like hares along the knowes together, not in the sense that hares are fast but more in that bow-backed, joggy way they’ll move from the form to feed. Then they ran down to leap on another sheep that lay in a litter of molehills. Capering brightly enough to make me smile, they tried to climb onto her back and finally drove her to stand and shake them off; and all of this in light too-dark-to-tell so that creatures moved in shapes you could only perceive from the corner of your eye in the cool, condensing gloom.

I must have watched those lambs for half an hour, and I wouldn’t be so far distant if such a thing were to be seen when I have gone myself and somebody thought of me.