Bog Myrtle & Peat

I fished from four fifteen until the tide slapped up into the rocks and something like dawn had broken in the east. The world itself is small enough to have bent by the time you look out to Brampton or Alston, so there was no coast or flatlands above the eastern horizon – no such thing as Carlisle or the Eden Valley. The Pennines simply sprang up from the curvature like a tremble on the far horizon, as if the sea ran right to the foot of the fells. Off to the south, the Lake District glowed orange in the first light and then dulled for the cloud which boiled above it. And there was nothing for me but the endless, exploratory cast and return of lures and trebles spun through the green heave of a risen sea. 

I live in hope of a bass at the mouth of my most-loved river, and it would mean more to me than any number of silver fish taken further out in the Firth or down on the Atlantic fringe. People are known to catch bass at the waterfoot in the shadow of an iron age fort, but the achievement has so far eluded me. I’m consoled to find that, like many of these sporting ambitions, the task has opened up an entirely new world of knowledge and observation – I’ve known these cliffs since I was five years old, but bass have taught me to watch for the flow of currents and the movement of shoaling water.

The Solway is forever turning dials and adjusting itself – but with fish on the brain, it’s now in my interest to understand how and why the water turns from turbid brown to a glancing, green-shot swell of ocean proper. It calls for a new pair of eyes and a pencil, and yet I am still the same person beneath the fresh angle, held fast by an old insistence upon movements of people and cultures. Because the Solway in its chevron dart to Gretna is actually a bottleneck of countercurrents which swirl around Dublin, Rhyl and Ramsay Bay, and the water’s churned with the memory of early Christian Saints and foundered currachs; of longboats filled with local men who were shackled and taken away by the Vikings to be sold as slaves in Damascus and Baghdad. Here is the last they’d ever see of Scotland – and while I go to the coast for bass, both ends of the connection are nourished by a new perspective.

The tide had begun to turn on this latest failure. I had been drinking coffee and watching curlews fly singly or in pairs above the bursting tops of heavy, lacing waves. Perhaps it had been too windy, or maybe there’s something wrong with the way I cast. I should chase for the detail, but there’s plenty of time to work it out, and the bigger learning’s simply how to be on the coast; to keep my courage at the overturning brink of another world. While I know this shore, I have no clear sense of what lies beyond it. Tall waves are frightening in the dark, and the Solway’s full of bones. As if to accentuate the strangeness of this place, I sat with my fishing rod in my lap and watched an unfamiliar shape as it swam round a crumbling point nearby. It sat low in the water, but cocky and black and proud as a michelin tyre. I had no fear of being overhead above the crash and batter of waves on the rocks, and there was nobody within a mile anyway. So I said hello out loud.

Even at first glance, it was obvious that this strange duck had no fear of me whatsoever. He blinked and swam like a swan on a canal, almost within reach of my rod-tip. I saw a peach-pink saddle across the hump of his bill, and heavy-knuckled knees working casually beneath him in the water. There was little in the way of exertion or panic in his movements. I would have been terrified by the spray which broke across his back and shattered into threatening, ugly gouts of brine – but he simply swam through them, pushing out to the roughened sea as you or I might whistle and walk with our hands clasped gently behind our backs. 

Not long afterwards, I saw a tremendous gang of these same birds a little further offshore and recognized them as scoters. They’re often seen far out in rafts during cold days in January, but never more than indistinct black dots against a sparkle of the sea. This was the first I’d ever seen within half a mile, and the impression was of something entirely new, like a star fallen to earth in the weird imagined framework of a verse by Edward Lear. Even as I sat on the rocks and watched these sudden strangers frothing in the far-foam, a second shock thumped into me; an arctic skua had turned and flared and flown west towards Wigtownshire and Ireland. I can count the times I’ve seen these birds on the fingers of one hand, and only at Uig or Lybster and once at the Shiants – by which I mean to say that never here or even close to home.

Everything that I learn from this coast has been there all along, but it’s taken me almost forty years to find it. My Galloway has always felt like “moorland with a sea view”. Looking back inland from the shore, it’s possible that I’ve had it back to front.