Bog Myrtle & Peat

The heavy old trains which arrive and depart from the station at Grosmont are a sight to behold. They’re part of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, powered by coal and the peeped confinement of scalding water. These vintage engines carry people through all the most scenic parts of God’s Own Country, particularly where moorland falls suddenly down to the jaunt and pleasure of the North Sea. It’s the finest peak of British nostalgia, and a powerfully intense evocation of the past to feel the valves which thump and stagger in the billows. 

You could say this railway line is only playing at the history, but it’s being taken seriously in the grim conference of engineers and signalmen who stand together in gangs of two and three as the train waits for new passengers. Some of these staff are smudged with coaldust, and all have leather-bound caps to resist the fall of red-hot sparks from the open furnace pan. If you’re a tourist here, you’re welcome to climb aboard – but the spectacle hangs by a thread of legitimacy which holds this back from being an outright sop to rubbernecking passers-by. You’re allowed to suspend your disbelief and pretend that it’s for real as tremendous dragonesque palls of steam are spewed around the ticket office, and all manner of heart-stomping detonations turn your joints to jelly in ways which go far beyond a joke.

The engine I saw at Grosmont was one of the last of its kind, sealed and launched onto the rail network in 1963. And it was suddenly stirring to remember that at precisely the same moment in time, trains like these were commonplace in Galloway and the restless back-and-forth of transit between Dumfries and Stranraer. The Paddy Line was cut and abandoned in 1965; it never knew the thrum of modern diesel engines, so steam remains a living memory here. My neighbours can remember the sound of pistons which rode up the Long Wood from Dumfries to Kirkgunzeon; as a child, my Dad could walk to and from the train station in Dalbeattie, and from there gain access to all of the Wide Green Earth. It was normal then, and these fabulous coal-scented monsters were run-of-the-mill.

But I was brought up in the shattered remains of this railway line. I spent large parts of my childhood playing in the loopy shadow of the Big Fleet Viaduct, or watching for otters around the dregs of the old Urr Bridge. The railway left a visible tread-mark in Galloway, but the reality of these steam engines is absolutely beyond my ability to imagine them. They’re so far gone as to be impossible, and it’s one thing to know a railway line and quite another to understand what it’s for. And now I think the greatest experience I’ll never have is simply to catch a steam train from Dalbeattie to Newton Stewart – something that generations of my family knew as little more than a boredom.

But don’t you also dream of the screaming leap across Loch Ken to the cuttings towards Mossdale? Or the chuntering pause at Loch Skerrow in an endless red expanse of moor and grouse and eagles turning above the Airie? And if you know this place at all, surely you’ve been struck by the terrifying, blue-shone gape of the Fleet Viaduct, bound as it is to the drably bitching Clints of Drommore?

It’s more likely that I will walk on the moon than ever take this trip – but if you damn me for this lapse of nostalgia, I’ll damn you back by way of return; because aren’t we all longing for the same old thing?