Bog Myrtle & Peat

It was summer when I walked at the Devil’s Dyke, and the hawthorn trees were loud with blossom. Underpinned by flint and chalk, these Downs are unlike anything I’m likely to find at home. In the sun and the glittery blare of grasshoppers, the flowers were larger and more opulent than I could believe. Plants which I am used to seeing at the scale of a pinhead in Galloway were writ large as coins in Sussex, and a litter of butterflies tumbled between them. Many of these were familiar too, but somehow bigger and more expansive in the south, wearing their wealth more easily. Between the known excitements, there were chalkland blues and marbled whites as well; curiosities which fed into a fine spread of life in the tidy undulations. 

Later in the pub, I found roe buck antlers on the wall which almost made me spit my pint on the floor. The shape and height of a deer’s antlers are determined not only by the food that’s available, but also by access to certain minerals. And whatever we lack in Galloway, Sussex has in spades. I’m used to antlers like short thorns which rise to the height of a roebuck’s ears – but those heads were like a motorcyclist’s gauntlets; thick and tall and overspilling the pedicles like drips of tallow. I could only guess at the scale of the bodies which used to run beneath them.

When a friend from the south came to see me where I stand, he was astonished. He looked at the dykes and the depth of the stone and he told me that the first people to farm in Galloway must have been hard pressed indeed. But rocks are only hard when you’ve lain too long in the down, and for all that he peered down his nose at the peat and the steady rain, I could equally say that a fool could farm in Sussex, where the weather is kind and even the wildflowers are preposterous. 

There was only a small measure of malice in me when I returned to the Devil’s Dyke in December and found it changed. People were paying for the meter at the carpark, shivering at a pretence of the cold. And instead of berries, dog shit hung in little bags from the thorns. I saw sheep so fat that they wobbled with the work of walking, and cows which pecked selectively at their bales as if the main course would come later on a tray. I saw a raven in the distance, tiny as he turned above the Channel. But I couldn’t tell if he was calling for the sound of an aeroplane which flew back and forth above us both in leisurely loops. I have ravens of my own in Galloway, and they are vast against the silence.