Bog Myrtle & Peat

A storm arrived to slow the selling lambs. Leaves were torn from the trees and rushed like shoals of birds across the fields to frighten and confuse the work of gathering. The sheep flared and broke back on the dogs, and we couldn’t hear each other swearing. Then finally penned and confined in sweet fields by the merse, we worked on tags and dosing mouths with our backs to the risen gale – every movement harder and more prone to fumbling.

The buyer came and all the normal subtleties of bargaining were blown away. We wound up shouting numbers, and I’m not sure which of us was happy with the result. We’ll know for sure when it’s written down in black and white, and the price could be a surprise for both of us. Still, we shook hands and our coats bloated at once with the wind as if the point of physical contact had blown us up. I saw his face framed and smiling in the halo of a hood, then he turned and it all smashed to the shape of his ears.

We had to wait for him to reverse his trailer, and that’s when we could look away from the small immediate movement of our work. Zoomed out from tiny pens, the trees were bent and heaving on the hillside above us; bloated sloes were clattering like baubles in the hedge and the ivy straining. There were pigeons and redwings and fieldfares rolling around in that wind like fag ends in a tumbledrier, and the grass alive as silk to the rippling.

But best of all, the sea had burst itself and spilled around the lowland fields beneath us. When there’s low pressure in the Solway and a powerful offshore wind, the tide simply can’t go out. It’s penned inside the baymouths, and the fattened rivers pour down upon it like an overflowing bath. When we started to work those sheep, the merse had been full and slowly filling. Two hours later, it had exploded and swamped the dregs of summer grass with brackish murky water. 

Rafts of wigeon tracked brilliant campaigns across the newly formed floodlands; greenshanks screamed and a terrible weight of whooper swans had battled in to land on the churning, foam-edged fields. They’re usually snow white against darkening skies, but as leaves roared like newspaper headlines in a mist of sea-spray, the birds glowed in the backlight to the tune of a sonorous duck-egg blue.