Bog Myrtle & Peat

I fall too soon into autumn each year, but to walk in the morning is to be wrapped in webs and soaked by dew to the knee. The cloud’s forever snagging on the old high ground where the grouse are throwing out small broods and the heather’s red with beetle’s fire. Fishing for bass at the coast last week, it seemed as though Antrim and Down were ablaze with rain and the blue mist ascending; the Ard in steam like a queue of cattle on a wet day. And rain was all I could see when I looked back into Galloway from the Rhinns; rain and the tall horizon smudged and dull as fattening sloes. 

Even the most wholehearted lover of summer must admit that things have begun to fall apart these last few days. The barley’s cut and the heavy dawn is loud with geese in the stubble. Huge skeins of greylags rise and turn above the mist in the morning and the sudden rose hips and the almost ripened rowans are thickening fast. The whinn pods spit like wet wood on a dull fire, and the only sound from the woods is of buzzard chicks and the rising whine of flies. Every change is movement, but if spring is “time coming” then autumn is a departure.

If you dig back fifteen years, you’ll find this blog was based upon a wealth of projects and experiments on the open heather hill. I planted trees and studied grazing; I documented the growth and expansion of certain grasses and berries with notes and photos and sketches. In retrospect, I can’t always clearly say why these projects swallowed me so completely. I simply loved them because I loved this place, and both were brightened and intensified by the relationship. I wrote at length and tirelessly about specific insects, and how the sheep would move to catch the smallest comfort of a summer breeze. Nothing was too tiny or subtle to observe and record – so when we dug for cubs and killed them, or when I was clattered by a bullock in the pens, these events burst like fireworks in my imagination.

On birds, I learned everything at first hand. I cradled black grouse eggs in the palms of my hands, then I followed the progress of snipe and curlew chicks as they waddled beneath canopies of meadowsweet and ragged robin. In terms of biodiversity, things weren’t so bad back then. Nobody was doing much for wading birds because they weren’t regarded as a conservation priority. It was curiosity for its own sake, free from the panicked desire to “save” and “rescue” a dying landscape. That change was coming, but I didn’t know it at the time. Instead, I watched and followed the swell and contraction of the years with the silent yellow glare of an owl. And there would always be next year for a chance to look deeper and harder. I would vanish into the hills for hours and sometimes days at a time, returning home only for something to eat or a change of dry clothes. I remember that a contract came up for work which drew me away from the hill for three weeks –  I could have cried to have the connection restored when that time was served. I got home around midnight, running straight up into the summer grass. And for no obvious reason, I found that I had removed my shoes and socks to walk barefoot in the moss, as if to draw it closer and restore the bond more quickly.

I couldn’t have designed a better education for myself, and the bulk of what I know in adulthood was gleaned from those ditches and the twilit summer sun. Even when I knew the names and character of every plant and creature on the hill, the game was then to watch them flex and change against the seasons in unexpected combinations; how the raven hates the fox; how the adder stings the chick. In certain years, the bogs would foam with cotton like a vision of the heaving sea – twelve months later, the same plants would fail or deliver only a fraction of their former glory. Certain summers brought forth crowds of orchids, and the autumns flushed or failed with scabious or grass of parnassus. 

This year has offered a new mix, and there’s no clear reason for me to join the dots and draw myself back in time now above any other year. It’s simply the coincidence of a thousand details which have brought things together for me the way that vetch or valerian has brought itself together in a boom of the recent summer. Now I find that there is something unusually piercing in the cold start and the creep of pipits overhead this year; the lace of dew in the kale and the smell of blooming cattle. From where I’m sitting now, I could be up and out on that same old hill in less than half an hour, but what was laid along that life itself has entirely gone.

And it turns out that specific moments when change seemed deafeningly obvious are tiny against a far larger accretion of subtleties which arrived when I was looking elsewhere. So I could point to moments when I have thought “nothing will ever be the same again” – I could make a list of new arrivals and fresh responsibilities which have forced me in new directions. Some of these changes have become new lights in my life – but even if they were compiled on a single sheet of paper, they’d still fall short of explaining why I’ll never find my way home again. Because there’s something else at work, and even if the mouse in the grain-bin can only eat one seed at a time, he’ll feel the mound begin to move beneath him someday.