Bog Myrtle & Peat

How to fish for bass is not the problem. They’ll take whatever’s on offer, and there’s no great art to the game that I can see. The trick is learning when and where to sling your hook, and now I find that there are certain beaches around Luce Bay where the hunters come nosing inshore to grab for spratts and shrimps. Sometimes you can snag them as they sift through rocks and beds of roiling kelp – but there’s also value to be found on the clean grey sand and a level surrender to the rollers which ride into the bay from the direction of Dublin. 

Wading barefoot to meet the waves, you can pick up fish in the shallows where shadows blink and the dabs hold forth in the coastal haze of brine and freshwater which run together like cordial in a glass. It’s raucous, deafening fun to be overturned by the turquoise water, and after the first shock of contact, the tide is warm and consoling. Whether you’re soaked or not, it doesn’t make any difference to the fish – it’s simply a dividing line between calculated mastery and the reckless, wild pursuit of fathomless silver. You can look like you know what you’re doing with bass, or you can be churned by the sea and found bellowing laughter to the depth of your chest.

And while you’re out there, it seems like birds can’t understand what to make of people foreshortened to the depth of their heads and their shoulders. They pass within arm’s reach on the shore-flight; gannets and skuas with lethal, frightening eyes – and once a chittering gang of whimbrels which flared and spread prettily inland towards the House of Elrig. Sand shifts around your toes and the game is played in a pattern of sunburn and the cling of a saturated shirt; watching, casting and winding the hooks back home.

Later, you can sit with a fire in the rocks and watch the moonrise above the skerries towards the Mull of Galloway, feeling as close to the world itself as we did that day when the eagle dropped over Cairnsmore and fell to hunting through a shoal of golden plovers; as when the black-throated divers rose before dawn from Loch Enoch or the stags belled for the autumn-misted corries at Clenrie. I’m no great lover of John Muir. I like my places best when they’re named and known to my fathers – but surely Muir was right in finding joy both “somewhere out there” and also in ourselves. From where I stand in the give-and-take of a pregnant, bottle-green sea, the two are indivisible.