Bog Myrtle & Peat

There were bats in Battlefield, and a fox like a flag in the twilight. We walked to the top of Queen’s Park in the aftermath of a football match we didn’t watch, and somebody said that we lost. The streets were loud with tragic resignation, and a great thirst was descending upon the people there. But it was suddenly quiet on the hill where a gap in the trees opened towards the unlit Campsie Fells. I saw steeples and the tips of brigs in the foreground; flats and cranes in the summer’s midnight glow. The place was blowsy and foul with blossom, but there was comfort in the mad redemptive blare of blackbirds calling from tenement gardens. 

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The summer sorrel’s pink and light as lace in the marshes. I’ve never seen it lay on such a show, and in this quality of humid dusk the pink is red and interchangeable with brickwork, foxgloves and the breast of a wandering buck. He stops to lick his nose, then he barks and he tears at the tussocks.

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Cows huff in the summer night like dolphins. Perhaps it’s the pollen or a catch of the dew in their throats, but there’s never more than half a minute without some gentle hacking interruption. Moths churn around their bat black knees and the dusk soon brightens for dawn in the silence. Many years ago, the same sounds sung through the night above Tigh na Bruaich when a pod of porpoises passed beyond the jetty edge. They puffed and gasped for the starlit sky, trailing milky nets of phosphorescence.

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There’s a hare inlaid on the fiddle-head bend of the famous Whithorn crozier. I had to hunt for her, following the curve and redouble of a design which fattens and grows slender as the shape tapers round upon itself like a rising frond of bracken. She is not easily found in a tangle of saints and symbols – but I caught her in the end, sprinting at full stretch with her ears swept back behind her.

The crozier is a tiny, tricky object. It stands on temporary display in a perspex box at the museum, and it’s almost too much and too faded to grasp. But the inlaid hare alone is worth the trip, and I smiled to recall that she was also outside in the rainswept machar that day, couched in the hedgerow beneath tossing plates of elderflower blossom. There’s only one hare, no matter where she’s found. You could be surprised to see her on a 12th Century Bishop’s crozier – she has no obvious place or part to play there. But if she wasn’t included, you could be surprised by that too.