Bog Myrtle & Peat

William Soutar was fascinated by Gauguin. It seems like an odd connection, but one of Scotland’s finest Twentieth Century poets just couldn’t get the artist out of his head. Reading Gauguin’s journals from the South Sea Islands, Soutar was staggered by the Frenchman’s approach to creativity, which seemed to pursue the brightest and most passionate… Continue reading

It seems like there are lapwings in every field of the North Pennines now, and often a tense and overlapping churn of piebald wings in the snow. If these were reckoned to be more interesting birds, the laybys would be full of people come to see the show. They’d park their cars and set up… Continue reading

We were finished early – so on the spur of a moment, we went to hear the hill birds call at Brampton. It’s an hour’s drive and the dusk was cool and windless in the early days of April. Even as we parked the car the curlews flew between us, and it hurts me to… Continue reading

Triplet lambs came out of the morning. I was at another job in the hour before sunrise, and I looked up to find them strewn through the rushes like laundry blown from the line. The ewe stamped her foot at me but she couldn’t run for fear of leaving the new arrivals, so I walked… Continue reading

There’s a windfarm planned for Radnorshire. I read about it in the Guardian’s Country Diary, and I recognised the site as one I’d recently visited. The writer Jim Perrin wrote passionately in defence of the “wild country” around Fforest Clud, but it set me thinking on the nature of beauty and wilderness, both of which… Continue reading

Should I thank the larks for coming back? Ten years ago, I would have laughed at the suggestion. They had no choice but to sing, and I marked the date of their return as if the appointment was set in stone. But I have lost so much that nothing is certain now, and feeling the… Continue reading

This blog is now fifteen years old. I didn’t see that coming, but I was recently tickled by the memory of something I wrote in March 2010 on what used to be called “Working for Grouse”. It was a simple descriptive piece about an evening on the hill in early spring after a long day’s… Continue reading

I cut my blackthorn hedge with a handsaw, and I saved the thickest wood for kindling. The work was hard, but now and then I’d find a length of stem which grew in a reasonable expression of straightness. I saved these and carried them home to be hung in a bundle to dry. I hoped… Continue reading

Two of Henry Williamson’s stories overlap, and it’s interesting to measure one against the other. The Badger Dig (1923) and parts of The Epic of Billy Brock (1925) describe what seems to be the same event, and while the first is non-fiction and the second is fictionalised, they’re probably drawn from the same material. The… Continue reading

The night before my son was born, my father and I worked late in the fields behind the house. We were lifting neeps by hand, shocking the roots with our knifes in the dark. There had been snow for two days, but it rarely settles this close to the sea. It only lay as slush… Continue reading