Bog Myrtle & Peat

They let you open the windows on the train from Dumfries to Carlisle, and some of them don’t shut anyway. So you can really hear the engine as it hauls out from the station, and the town soon lags behind you. Then there are birch trees and ancient peatlands crouched like trifle towards Criffel and the river Nith. As you head east, it’s nice to look back on that hill and know that your worries lie behind it. I’ve sometimes caught a glimpse of Criffel from Longtown or Langholm and felt a surge of delight that I’m almost home. But just as often, it’s grand to look back and see it getting smaller.

Compared to where I come from, Nithsdale’s downright prosperous. There’s a wealth of fine finishing cattle in the fields, and fat stands of corn which swirl in the wake of the passing train. I often take a book or a newspaper to read during the journey, but I never get to them as the details gather pace and flicker beneath me. Pigeons fly, and the hedges are festooned with linnets – parts of the Lake District are already visible through the trees and across the water. Beyond the remains of a windmill at Mouswald, the train will sometimes blow its horn for no other reason than to startle the birds and let England know we’re coming.

The tracks ride high across the river into Annan, and there’s a chance to look downstream towards the harbour and the mess of warehousing which backs onto the quay. Then past the station, you’re casting further from home through playing fields and the flatlands where maize grows so quickly that by the time you’ve got to Carlisle and caught the first train back, you’d hardly recognise the place. Often in winter, the big diesel engine will throw up a bow-wave of geese which have been standing idly in the fields beside the line. But in the height of midsummer, the sky’s the colour of old denim and the carriages fill with the smell of mown grass.

Gretna station is smaller than Annan. There’s not much to see, but sometimes I spot a man with a camera photographing the same train as it shuttles back and forth at hourly intervals. He doesn’t wave back, but it hardly matters because then you’re ready to cross the border in a single plunging whoop of glory. From a tangle of cuttings and embankments, the train bolts into open country towards the river Esk. The clouds are suddenly vast and underscored by lines of pylons and the cables which belly between them in luxuriant curves to the far horizon. Then you cross the river with a raucous, plosive “Paaah”, and that’s better than the train’s horn because nobody chose to make it happen. Inland, the Pennines rise in a stirring swell; downstream, the river widens into a broadness of creeks and banks which finally become coasts as the sea drives a wedge between them.

It’s all downhill to Carlisle then; an oak forest, an auto-salvage yard and the dense complexity of commercial sidings where gravel and timber is shunted and stacked. They’re sometimes loading spruce trees there, and the sap stinks through the train’s open windows like sinus medication. Over parks and the Eden, the train finally slows beneath a dull, uncomfortable thug of a Castle. There’s a smell of biscuits, and somebody’s hung the Cumbrian flag from the window of a top storey flat; three blooms of grass of parnassus on a green field above wavy blue lines of water. I wish it was my flag too, and I look for my favourite graffiti between the buddlia.

I first made this journey into England when I was four or five years old, and it’s never ceased to thrill me in all the intervening years. I can’t get my head around it; a voyage of international significance transacted in thirty nine minutes from start to finish. But in truth it’s a humdrum trip – everybody on that train has been here a thousand times before, and we’ll never learn that it’s pointless to stand for the exit before the doors have opened.