Bog Myrtle & Peat

“Book-learning is the thing. You’re a lucky man. No stock to feed, no milking times, no tillage Nor blisters on your hand, nor weather worries”

These last few mornings I’ve been down to the lambing at dawn in a blend of weathers, from the startling low-light glare of a sun which plays upon the wheatears to the dumb blue flatness of rain. The river sank, then rose again – hares rushed in the floodings while the stonechats looked and learned; each day a mirror of the last, but utterly different.

It’s grand to see the new lambs run behind their mothers, and something like peace to watch a labouring ewe as she turns upon herself and lies down fitfully in the myrtle like a dog to its bed. There’s always a temptation to get involved in these moments, but these sheep are so wild and resilient that it’s easy to do more harm than good by stepping in. So I keep a steady eye on her progress and seek instead for the staggered trees and the blue-rinse failure of blackthorn blossom in the dimity glow. Snipe drum loudly in the cloud, and the shelducks cluster on the banks where the rabbits used to dig. I trust the process, but I’m never more grateful for the mounting distractions of spring.

And before you know it, the ewe is suddenly up and dabbing at her newly rumbled young, pawing it to rise with her hooves and lapping fervently at the yellow mess of its fleece. Life goes on without me, and I’m only spurred to intervene when the ravens come to land tauntingly close to the newborn lambs, claiming the cleanings but taking whatever they can in the moment. I can’t be there to shout or shoo for every fresh arrival, and the action feels tiny in the face of constant, watchful threat. I have already lost one lamb to ravens this year, and even that was done in the time it took to get dressed and run outside in the half-light. If the old-time farmers used to hate the fox, there’s a new and more pervasive enemy in the ash trees and out above the tombstone corries where snow still glows on a wet morning. I love ravens, but I don’t have life to spare them.

I’m also anxious for the lambs on the cusp of a wet night – as anxious as I am when, looking up from the summer’s hay, black clouds ride in from the west. And here at last is an old reminder of why this work ever appealed to me in the first place – because despite the constant pull of my desk and the ink which sings to be spilled, I spend so much of my time in response to the weather and the flight of crows to their hidden stack in the hedge. Lambing hones the need for watchfulness, and the outdoor day’s lived large beneath a changing sky. There are weather worries because weather matters, and strange at this time of year to hear a man look up with his eyebrows raised, saying “did it rain? I didn’t know”. Because when by chance I meet my neighbours in the fields or the High Street, I know they’re also cursed by the mounds of sleet which marched unwelcome in from the Irish Sea; the wind’s disfigured our days more than the fresh announcement of some disaster retold on the radio news bulletin, and if everybody shares the bending weight of cold rain in the darkness, aren’t we simply tending closer together? 

It’s all too easy to draw the curtains and feel nothing for the sound of water falling in the night, but the fragile promise of new-born lambs turns the prospect of hail into ice on your spine. Having watched them gambol in the rocks like hares, it’s easy to imagine they’re unbreakable – until you find them washed out and flopped between the tussocks, and it doesn’t matter if the ravens find them then. Heaney’s man was envious of “book learning” and a life of comfort between the lines. He yearned to be free from tillage, blisters and stock to feed. To be sure, a life indoors looks grand to the man who feels the rain on his neck, but if he sought freedom from “weather worries” too, he turned his back on the world and thought only of himself.