Bog Myrtle & Peat

It was a hot night in the village hall at Moniaive. The seats were squeaky, and the audience filled with familiar faces as Tom Pow took the stage to perform The Village and the Road. I’d already seen the show in New Galloway, but it’s a great piece of theatre and I would’ve travelled twice the distance to watch it again. Weaving threads of loss and decline into wider contradictions of home and away, The Village and The Road is driven by an extraordinary soundtrack provided by four-piece band The Galloway Agreement. It’s a pleasure to hear them play, not least because it sometimes feels like real music has vanished in a surge of digital playbacks. You could say they played the same as every time they’ve played before, but each live performance is irreplicable, and it gave me a buzz to think that if the power failed and the lights went out on Moniaive, the performance would scarcely bat an eyelid.

The Village and The Road is made up of sketches, music and poetry. It’s preoccupied by a sense of hiraeth, the Welsh word which designates a feeling of loss or nostalgia which has no direct equivalent in English. The Welsh poet RS Thomas sneeringly referred to English as “the thin language”, and he often played with words which cannot be easily figured out on the basis of direct equivalence. Beyond his irascible nationalism, he was reminding us that language is often a compromise between shorthand and precision, and even words which aren’t our own can take us to the heart of ourselves.

Central to the performance, there’s a story from Sligo where a much-loved man walked over a hill and was never seen again. To heighten the loss and mystery of the moment, a soundtrack of moorland sounds was played through speakers. Blended into a wealth of true, organic music, a recorded curlew sang. It was a little jarring, but the digital bird made sense to the audience as a proxy for a thousand additional words. We understood it immediately, and we loved it.

There’s a fair skelp of moorland between Moniaive and home. Driving home on the edge of darkness, I came back above the enormous bowl of Loch Urr, following a line of electricity poles which stood like black scaffolding in the dusk. The Irish novelist Walter Macken called poles like these “an insult to the sky” when they first began to appear on the moors of Galway, and it’s useful to remember that these old, dependable timbers were a novelty in my grandfather’s day. Open landscapes often fool us into believing that nothing ever changes, and I love the offence that Macken took because remotenesses were shattered by the coming of electric wires, for better and worse.

I stopped above the lapping water and the myrtle to listen for ten minutes in a place where curlews used to be famous. That sound recording had done enough to establish a keynote, but I wanted to hear it ring for real. I knew there were two pairs displaying above their territories here in April, but as the darkness fell it seemed like they had failed or lost heart. At the height of their decline, we just can’t bank on the birds anymore.

The moorland silence weighed heavily on me; heavier in the wake of that recorded curlew, and what I’d gained from live music was now reversed upon me. As an audience, we could accept the electronic bird because we knew what it meant, but each of us learned that meaning for ourselves in a root of real experience. Art invites us to revisit what we know of the world, stirring up memories and ideas which already lie inside us – that’s why it often feels so personally affecting. But as the birds decline, that emotional vocabulary is diminishing, and in thirty years when a new generation has grown up without the real sound of curlews in the sky above them, recordings will smudge the call into cliché. It will become meaningless, and I wonder how we’ll replace that broken lever with something new – because whatever curlews make us feel will persist beyond the death of the last bird, and there will be no way left to describe it.