Bog Myrtle & Peat

High times on the Cree at Challoch and the road to Bargrennan. After several days of rain, the river’s risen to the lip of the highway, and the view from the verge is only of black, disturbing water. It’s too wild for the ducks and the usual stands of cattle which wait to the depth of their bellies in the summer. Those easy days are over, and there’s no sign of life in the spate as it rolls down from Ayrshire in alternations of movement and stillness.

In its deeper reaches, the water looks flat and placid as treacle in a tin. But clods of belly-white foam belie the stasis; they rush and turn to show that the river is racing down in vats and barrels like tar. Now and then, stacks of that foam will trap itself in blind corners or back-cuts between the forks of hard-befallen roots, and there it revolves in sad confusion like the videos you see of animals sent mad by repetition and confinement. Standing back from the water, the evening is suddenly still and quiet enough to hear the stags roaring. Hinds were in the kale in the day, and the trampled crop is marked with their footfalls – each one now filled with grey, refracting rain.

But there are sprays of colour in the banksides. Aspens shine, and hazel leaves are warm with failure. Ash trees chill the dusk with sprays of lemon and lime, and silhouetted against the cloud, bunches of their keys hang black and heavy as fruitbats. Beyond the woods on ground which rises above the river, the grass itself has turned away into patterns of autumnal colour; there are shades of raspberry and rust; sunburn and psoriasis on the fallen moors where even the myrtle has finally come up short. Above the black water and the oily stems of darkened trees, the air is cold and fungal; the bracken hung out to get wetter like screeds of shitty paper.

A mile upstream of the flatlands and the groan of deepened water, the river runs through a narrow gap in the forest. Alders and oaks stand in parallel walls above the banks and the glow of the loaded sky falls vertically down in the same, hateful slot as a striplight hung in a classroom or a hospital corridor. The water moves louder here, rioting in a pattern of rills and fins through rapids and the wreckage of fallen stones. Each boulder is unique and writes itself on the torrent, just as a flood which runs through a drowned street would swirl differently around waterlogged bins and cars or a dog left tethered and trailing from railings. The roar’s enough to make you cover your ears with your hands, and then it’s little more than a hop and a skip to the onset of screaming in the rain. Beneath the din, certain bed-set rocks are being tipped back and forth on random, accidental balance-points. They’re thumping on the riverbed like the drums of a march, and the thumps can be felt through the soles of your boots. 

I wouldn’t last thirty seconds in that river on my own. The crush and thunder of those rocks would break me into pieces; my body divided at last into two categories according to criteria I never saw coming until now – not “body and soul” or “arms and legs” but pieces that float and pieces that don’t. It hardly bears thinking about, but on its way to join the terrible rush of a risen river, the rain tugs at my cuffs and proposes that I should go along for the ride – because if you’re already wet, what harm is there in getting wetter?