Bog Myrtle & Peat

My father’s friends would go to shoot on Billy Inglis’ hill. When I was seven or eight years old, I’d often join them for the sake of the walk and the wonder of feeling like a man. It was fine to see snipe shot as they turned against the cloud, but the group was more… Continue reading

At the end of a long day at the fences, we’d sit together in the sand or on the lowered back door of the bakkie. Sometimes we’d take guns from the back seats and shoot sand-grouse for the braai, but more often we were distracted by drink and laughter in the sunset. Twenty years have… Continue reading

You’ll have seen the way that deer will come together when the weather’s been unkind. They gather in gangs in the frozen fields, and as the rising sun breaks out upon them at the height of their heels, the effect is of freezer blue shade in the soap-green grass, and the whites of their chins… Continue reading

What are we in the hands of great God? It was in vain you set up thorn and briar In battle array against the fire And treason crackling in your blood; For the wild thorns grow tame And will do nothing to oppose the flame; Your lacerations tell the losing game You play against a… Continue reading

Georgeham lies in a cleft of the hills above the sea. The village crowds in every angle and shape around a noisy little stream, and there are steep banks of thatch and narrow streets which lead in sudden, twisting angles from the main road to Woolacombe. There’s a jolly pub and a tall, slate-grey church… Continue reading

There are ancient hillforts all around the bay, and on my father’s farm the outline of a Roman encampment which has been overgrown with trees and a thousand generations of roots. When I was twelve or fourteen years old, I fitted out an expedition to explore these deep remains. I took a spade from the… Continue reading

They used to keep donkeys on the cliffs above the bay. The animals were penned outside the dyke where more profitable livestock was set to graze, right on the brink of a three hundred foot tumble to the sea. It sometimes made my hair stand on end to see those donkeys perched so close to… Continue reading

The Saxons are fashionable again, and a number of recent books have reimagined Saxon culture as a kind of “Dreaming” in which pagan warlords overlap with giants and goblins on the fringe of early Christian reason. Viewed through the lens of Tolkein’s Middle Earth, modern writers find plenty of light in Anglo Saxon England –… Continue reading

Jim was on the hayshed roof when I arrived. He waved and I went inside to the kitchen and put the kettle on. Then as I walked round to the stackyard, I saw the ladder had slipped and realised that was marooned on the tin. I shouted “Christ sake man, how long have you been… Continue reading

Picture me thusly, oh dearly beloved; curled up on my oggy knocky and taking a break from the aggle-culture as I sometimes finds it. Stuck on peaceful thoughts of glad tidings and gumdrops to all men, I watched the golubs flying back and forth from their sheddywed like lewdies off a-rabbiting in the big, big… Continue reading