Bog Myrtle & Peat

Spring lends itself to small traditions. Just as I note the arrival of sand martins, swallows and wheatears on the moor, I’ve fallen into the rhythm of taking the little dog onto the hill in the evening to watch the progress of a massive fire which burns relentlessly off to the west.  

For four consecutive nights, we’ve climbed together through a tangle of whinns and blackthorn scrub, levelling out at last in a high meadow of tussocky grass and blaeberry. The little dog is too small to make much sense of the endeavour, but she likes it when I lie down in the moss and look west towards the heavy, climbing palls of smoke which rise between Straiton and Newton Stewart. She clambers all over me, nudging my binoculars and pressing her nose between the buttons of my shirt – until I finally shove her away and she tumbles happily into grass, chewing the stumps and roots of ancient heather plants. Off in the distance, massive moulds of smoke might as well be low-hanging clouds.

I’ve never witnessed a fire like this, and even the grandest runaways I’ve seen were under control again within forty eight hours. But there’s nothing to stop a fire in that direction; it’s a vast area of open moorland with nothing in the way of brakes or interruptions for miles in any direction. It’s no surprise to find the smoke still rising each morning, and sometimes in the darkness a glitter of orange or yellow flame. 

At first it seemed to be confined towards the Dungeon Hills, but that fire dwindled and began to flow north and south like slow-moving gel. By Saturday, the entirety of the Minnigaff Hills seemed to be up, and ominous clouds of smoke were rising north towards Loch Dee and Shalloch-on-Minnoch. Viewed from a distance of twenty miles, the effect was oddly benign, like the mist which often hangs across these hills after a cold night. By day, the only hint of fire is in a muddy amber cast to the underside of these low-rising clouds as they sweep away into Ayrshire and out across the Firth of Clyde. Friends on the far side of this fire near Girvan and Ballantrae have rung and written to say that their sun is being tinted by the smoke; they’ve asked for pictures of what it looks like from my end, and it’s odd to find that we’re watching the same phenomenon play out across fifty miles of southern Scotland.

Official reporting so far has been vague and noncommittal. Thankfully, it sounds like everybody’s safe – and there’s little risk to property or habitation in a landscape where nobody lives. Most of what’s burnt belongs to the state; it’s managed on our behalf by Forest and Land Scotland, and so far it seems that there’s nobody to blame. This sets an odd contrast to other fires which have torn into landscapes where grouse moor management, rewilding projects or crofting quickly escalate into torrents of accusation and recrimination. The important thing is to extinguish this fire, and the only silver lining is that in terms of its timing, there will be little harm done to birds and wildlife. 

Grouse and plover rarely lay their first clutches before the middle of April, and black grouse are still a month away from nesting. Moorland wildlife is astonishingly resilient to fire, and while a few stonechats and whinchats will have lost their nests, they’ll quickly lay again. Despite scenes of devastation now, these charred landscapes will be green again in six weeks’ time – and in the longer run, a wealth of richer, better heather will offset the losses to nature. It may not seem like it now, but of the five major wildfires I’ve helped with or been part of in Galloway over the last fifteen years, every single one resulted in an appreciable increase of black grouse within two or three years.

It’s also hard to overlook the association between burning and ring ouzels – birds which almost always appear in Galloway in the aftermath of big fires. The birds like steep slopes and short vegetation; they used to be extremely abundant in Galloway when the hills were burnt on rotation. None had been seen breeding in my part of the county for thirty years until a fire which got away from us in 2012. They bred successfully in 2013 and within a few years we had five pairs. Ten years later, they had all gone – the heather had grown too tall for their liking, and the scree banks were abandoned again.

The first batch of leverets will be lost to this current fire, and given that many young goat kids are still too small to move far in April, the chances are that they’ll fail as well. Perhaps the eagle’s eyrie at Shalloch will be scorched, but when another eyrie near Laurieston was burnt out in 2020, the birds moved almost immediately to another site nearby. The impact is dramatic for wildlife, but it can be accommodated. 

And in the meantime, my little dog is getting used to the nightly trek onto the hill. She thinks it’s simply what we do, but the fire can’t burn forever – and whether rain or helicopters finally bring this blaze to heel, a new pattern will soon follow in the roll towards summer. She’s still too small to come along with me on treks into the Galloway Hills – but she’ll be ready when the autumn comes and the land is well on its way to recovery.