Bog Myrtle & Peat

Land came up for sale next door, and I heard because somebody had seen the listing on Facebook. For two weeks there were cars parked at the road end and strangers walking back and forth across the hill. I watched them from the window and the pens; some of them in high-viz jackets, and others in glittering 4x4s. Following the thread of the notification online, it was clear that alerts were being sent to purchasers from London and Europe, and agents had come to see if there was money in the old place.

I went to say hello to one visitor and took him by surprise as he sat in his truck with the windows up and the engine running. He jumped, then he turned his clipboard upside down on the dashboard so I couldn’t see what it said. We talked about the day and the grass, and it wasn’t for me to ask him where he’d come from. Afterwards, I bet he wondered what I wanted – and why it was any of my business.

Even ten years ago, a farmer who looked to sell his land would speak at first to his neighbours. Folk would club together to buy land which lay against their own, and farms were only offered for sale on the open market as a last resort. Just as you’d expect in a Walter Macken novel, sales to “outsiders” were considered to be calamitous, and newcomers met with cool suspicion. It’s still a habit for men (and only men, it seems) to bear the name of the land they have. So you might see Dalmannoch and The Derg in the pub, or make plans to catch Falminnion in the morning – but you don’t claim the name for yourself – you need to be given it, and it follows that the Englishman who bought Clonshank in 2007 and introduced himself by that name in the pub was laughed out of the building. It didn’t help that Clonshank himself was still alive. His wife was ill and they needed the money to move nearer the town, so the name was already taken. But even after the old boy died, the Englishman’s grandchildren would still have been called The New Folk at Clonshank, and not Clonshank. There’s deep heredity there, and a delicious blurring of man and place from the days when there were many such tiny landowners and a walk of five miles could talk you through the well-known property of ten or fifteen families.

It’s something new that land is offered for sale through agents on social media as a first port of call. And it has a bearing on neighbours who discover the change by accident – or as they scroll distracted through photographs of graduations and holidays and livestock for sale. But there’s too much money in land now, and it’s silly to imagine that your neighbour might have put a few pounds to one side over many years. Perhaps the land so obviously goes to monied investment groups or expansive dairy boys that you wouldn’t embarrass a little man by asking him to match it. Maybe it’s a new kind of politeness, but it contributes to a sense that we don’t own this place anymore; it’s bought and sold around us, and each person clings on where they can. 

I must confess that it was nice to see human beings on the hill again. I hadn’t realised how much I had missed them. Of course these people were nobody in particular, and in many ways they represented a threat to the calm continuity of the glen. But a body gives scale to a landscape, particularly at this time of year when the tall grass churns to the swirl of a sea wind. The figure of a human being provides a sense of perspective which feels like reassurance – if there’s too little life in the winter, there’s surely too much of it now, and the shape of a man at work speaks to the hope that things will pass.

I like to spot the movement of people, but it’s rarely actual bodies I see in the landscape now. My neighbours (when I see them at all) are in trucks or conjoined with bikes, even for the shortest journeys. Weeks pass without any actual folk to see in the silage crops and out around the heads of young dairy heifers. Then all of a sudden there is a burst of activity like this; land is sold or more likely there are heavy machines which come and take the grass, and the people inside are boys or strangers from other places. They don’t get out and they haven’t time to talk; and there’s no assistance of scale or understanding when human beings are inside machines. 

The first tractors mimicked horses by putting the man on display in a saddle. He could look out and down upon the world, and everybody’s eye was drawn to the centaur. But then he vanished inside a glassy reflective box on top of an engine which can be any size and only seem to get bigger. You need a ladder to get inside some of them, and now folk are almost out of the machines altogether. The driver sits somewhere else and controls the show with a joystick. It’s just a matter of time until all land is managed this way, and the memory of a half hour’s gossip with a neighbour is clocked on the timesheet as a break and not farming.

Once this land is sold, there will be no more people on the hill. Life will go on, but beyond the loneliness which lacks a scale and the help which no longer comes in the aftermath of stormy weather, there are some silver linings. As land is stockpiled and mounded into the hands of a tiny and dwindling number of people, back doors are opening. There’s nobody to stop people like me taking sticks or pigeons from the hedgerows anymore; nobody to catch me in the act of lifting firewood or cutting bracken as bedding for the pigs. I used to be terrified that I would be caught poaching, and it’s right that I have had my knuckles rapped on this account in the past. But there’s nobody to say boo to a goose these days, and a new code of conduct has emphasis on different things. It’s more like every man for himself – and besides, nobody cares about these things which have no value. The focus is only on the narrowest kinds of ownership and the blinkered single-mindedness of one crop only. 

So if you want a heap of hazel hurdles or a fat brown trout, just take them and share them with your friends. Fill your boots with bucks and berries, because this is the real fabric of belonging in a place, and didn’t the Highlanders promise themselves access to Breac a linne, slat a coille,
Is fiadh a fireach – a trout from the stream, a staff from the wood, a deer from the hill, and never theft to take any of them.

Besides, it’s a victimless crime; the new breed of landowners won’t even notice what they’ve lost; in the day-to-day experience of living on land, titles and deeds can be made to seem laughably irrelevant. When the dust has settled on this latest sale, the blossom and the hill birds will still belong to anyone who’ll take them. The only loss is how things used to be for human beings – and in a world of forgetting, that doesn’t count for much. Take me for example; take me and how silly I sound for casting back to the days when people were known by the names of their places.