Bog Myrtle & Peat

This blog is now fifteen years old. I didn’t see that coming, but I was recently tickled by the memory of something I wrote in March 2010 on what used to be called “Working for Grouse”. It was a simple descriptive piece about an evening on the hill in early spring after a long day’s work. I was trying to capture the sound of snipe drumming against the stars, and the reassuring warmth of grouse which called as they went down to roost for the night. I hadn’t seen this piece for years, but it came to mind because it received extremely warm commendation on this blog. People really liked it, and I was very encouraged by that support. It came at a fragile moment, and I think it probably galvanised my belief that I could actually be a writer after all. I’m not sure I ever thanked those commenteers, but I know that some of them have continued to follow this blog ever since. And it’s telling that when I went back to find that piece for the sake of sharing it again on this fifteenth anniversary, I couldn’t. It’s buried and lost, and part of me regrets that. But I balance the small “what a pity” against the realisation that things do get lost – and it’s not for me to laboriously recover them, only to push on and keep making.

It’s a criticism of the Galloway writer SR Crockett that “he wrote too much to write well”. I have that caution in the back of my mind, and I think the same accusation could be justly levelled against me. But as a back-hander, I’d also say that Crockett often “wrote too badly to write well”, and you can’t plan for a legacy anyway. With fifteen years of hindsight, I reckon that if there’s anything I love more than writing, it’s this place and the endless intrigue and inspiration I find here. The sheer mass of stuff and ideas on this blog is testament to an often-oppressive sense of excitement and pride in the idea and experience of my home in Galloway, in Scotland and across all the wet, western margins of the UK. I don’t seriously expect anybody to work through everything I write, but I hope the very nature of my excess is a point in its own right.

Thank you to everybody who comes here. I am bad at replying to support or feedback, but it lands and I hear it. I don’t know why this blog has become such an enormous long-term project – I’m only consoled by the realisation that what matters to me also matters to others.