Bog Myrtle & Peat

It’s hard to draw a line between Donegal and the Dungeon Hills of Galloway. They’re almost interchangeable, and if you love the awful granite wreckage of ice-age mountains, you’d be as happy in one as the other. That’s the point, because the rocks of Ireland and Scotland can be made to overlap in all kinds of fresh, infesting ways – and when I fear that I have lost the place of my birth and upbringing to change and over-closeness, there’s comfort in a fresh facsimile which lies almost within touching distance, out beyond the water. 

It’s fun to wonder why I feel like a stranger when a cool sun plays on the Irish moss and the asphodel stars in well-known constellations. It’s peat and wet and western grass; the play of pools and grating rock for the sudden rush of dragonflies which glide above the bog. The same old fox runs in risen ferns like a banner, and unlabelled snapshots from Galloway and Donegal have been poured into the same box so that I can hardly tell them apart in the jumble. And if there is a slighter freshness to the vast Atlantic wind of Ireland, it doesn’t carry far beyond the moment – down in the overgrown haggs and the long-healed ruts of donkeys and carts, I only see the faintest marks of people, without a care for if they were mine or yours.

I was overwhelmed by the desperation of rough and sudden slopes above Lough Eske. Sheets and spines of naked stone rose like dragon-backs between the moss, and the only sounds in the gentle breeze of Croaghgorm summit are the changeable movement of water falling, or the distant, downward weep of golden plover. Facing north to Errigal, I might as well have looked for Goat Fell, or the silver Paps of Jura – just as I look for these shapes when I stand on my own high ground. They’re simply parts of the same place, and perhaps I’d understand the connection if I could bend myself to grasp the simplest strands of geology. Then I would be able to explain why, after rain and in the sudden gash of sunlight, the Bluestack Mountains are almost blushing pink. When this effect is played an hour or two later as the same rains have rushed across Antrim and the North Channel, the Galloway Hills are only grey and heightened in their greyness by the water. But that’s another quickly-lost divisor, and it’s mad to claim you’ve moved between two houses when all you did was step from the porch to the kitchen’s frowning shade.

The only clear divergence lies in how we tell of ourselves, and if I am struck by the difference between Donegal town and a place like Kirkcudbright, the line is blurred in the hills. Devoid of human movement, these rocks are all one thing – and while I respond to manmade legends of heroism and nationality, they’re built upon such places – because from the first stone that is laid in the bigging of a tale, there’s a distortion which leans towards the maker. Pretty soon, there’s land where you can go that I cannot, and gossamer-light lines are wound as strong as wire. It matters what we say of home, but these are only sayings which need to be measured against shelves of glaciated rock which bear the scars of ice like the tracks of a currycomb on the warm skin of a horse; the same light strokes which run from Stornoway to County Kerry, and I was never more in love with my own home than when I found it somewhere else.