Bog Myrtle & Peat

It seems like there are lapwings in every field of the North Pennines now, and often a tense and overlapping churn of piebald wings in the snow. If these were reckoned to be more interesting birds, the laybys would be full of people come to see the show. They’d park their cars and set up scopes on tripods to stare and compare notes on the advancing year; local schools would be leading children out on trips to watch the newly coming spring, expressed for the sake of warming shorthand in green feathers and a little bent crest. But there’s no great rush to the moors on a day in late February; no dash or cluster of attention to mark the signal change. It’s as if nobody cares, or the birds are taken for granted when they tumble into view with the lengthening days. And if nobody cares where they are, there’s even less interest in where they are not. What I wouldn’t give for lapwings to return here as they did when I was a child, but if big flocks fail to make headlines, what hope for silence?

Curlews fly above the A66 on the sudden descent towards Penrith. I watched them turn in groups of seven and nine, then sink in shifts to a maze of dykes and the doorless, gawping barns which stand in scattered confusion across these hills. There’s no great secret to the massed arrival of wading birds, and most cars have windows. So even if you had not come to watch the skies darken with life, it’s surely unavoidable. But there are no desperate skidmarks on the tarmac, or signs of vehicles overturned by the desperate impulse to stop and inhale the scene. Our lives go on because Spring is in the detail, and these hills look just as they did in December. And maybe that’s why nobody comes to see change which often appears to be tiny. And I wonder if it’s possible for me to write anything about my own place in Galloway now which doesn’t sound like heartache, with every point of soaring praise then downed at last in loss.

I went down to Ninekirks at Brough; the abandoned church in a bend of the river Eden. Plates of ice had grown in the eddies like the mess of an ancient kitchen, and the pools where I swam in July are snagged with the bones of jetsam trees. I took a view from the kirk’s east window, across pasture and trees to the white-wracked heaps at the heights of Croglin, seeing only hill and snow and the peak of cold austerity. This is how the North Pennines are generally seen, at arm’s length at out of hearing. But every cracked unwrapping of cottongrass buds, the small is coming vast.