Bog Myrtle & Peat

They’ve opened up a quarry in the woods behind the house. Heavy machines have come to roar at the granite, and I can hardly complain because this work is nothing new. For as long as I’ve known this place, the roadsides have been strewn with the car-sized wrecks of rocks blown out in the sixties. That stone was worked and loaded onto gantries before being carried to the railway station, and all of this industry transacted within half a mile of where I sit to type. The last train is long gone and there’s nothing but birch trees and heather in the wake of the workings these days. If I feel like I’m losing the peace of an unspoiled landscape, it’s more like a resumption of loud normality. Besides, I like the men who come to lean on the rocks and spit – there are supposed to be people here, and I think this work has missed them. To crown weeks of sorting out and preparation, there came the crump of dynamite at the quarry face and an almost visible shockwave which bent the kitchen window inwards and set the pheasants yelling. Jimmy the Blast set monitoring equipment in the yard, and he afterwards told me the tremble was measured at five point six. He reckoned the safe limit was six, and I don’t know what these numbers mean.

The sheep began to wag their tails in the warmth, and I have felt my fingers burned in recent years when flies came up and chewed my stock to mush with maggots. I’ve come to love my border leicester tup, particularly now that his lambs have risen and prospered with such enthusiasm – but he was a devil to catch between my knees and pin him shut on the point of his arse for the clipping. It wasn’t the best day for this work and his fleece was moist with sweat and the overnight rain, but the hand-shears slipped beneath the hanging strands of his pendulous leicester wool, and soon he was bare and crisp as porcelain. Without his fleece, he was more like an ass than a sheep – long-necked, bandy-legged and ridiculous to the very bend of his fine hare’s head. Afterwards, he sulked in the risen thistles while young starlings landed on his back like African oxpeckers. He closed his eyes and sighed.

We found the year’s first roe kid in a mess of orchids, and then there was an adder in the road. So we stopped the truck and ran to see it before it vanished because adders are no longer common here, and you can’t expect to find them like you did. They’re an unusual treat, so my son and I squatted down in the powdered ground until our knees were at our ears. I said it was a girl because she was brown, and then I poked in her direction with a stick to make her hiss. She obliged with a rasping fuss like the sound of hair burning, and if you think I shouldn’t have provoked her to such a length of fury, remember that I am the first of my name in this parish who would not have killed her offhand. She’s better angry than dead, and my son was impressed with the livid display – but the snaking simplicity of his written letter S is now confused because adder starts with A.

There was a fox in the sprayed-off field at dawn. He was very right in the wreckage of dead grass and dockens, and I can recall the pinpoint clarity with which I saw my first vixen when I was four years old. The excitement endures at every contact since, and if there’s sometimes a flair of destruction which accompanies the sight of a fox, more often it’s wonder and a snarl of recognition. This fox was fine with his fallen-off tail and the fur which combed from his haunches in the descent towards a summer coat. He ran uncertainly in the way that foxes have in a moment of disturbance. He rocked like a jockey for several paces, then he turned to look back over his shoulder in the soft rain, and I could have that shape carved on my stone.

In broad daylight and without any invitation or announcement, a short eared owl flew over the yard and the new quarry towards the sea. It was high and far away – little more than a single speck in the low cloud. Friends have sometimes asked me “how can you tell what’s what from such a distance?” and the truth is that I can’t – but certain shapes and movements are strikingly recognisable, and I’d know the short eared owl’s gentle, mothy lope from a mile away or more; keg-chested and the paper-crisp wing. Crows were scrambled from the trees to intercept that owl, but he was on another plane. By the time they were high enough to engage, he was gone.