Bog Myrtle & Peat

A fair measure of drink was taken in the Black Mountains above Crickhowell. We capered into the evening like bats, and when it finally turned cold and the moon was lost at last in banners of high cloud, we moved inside to the barn to smoke cigarettes. I haven’t seen my friend for five years,… Continue reading

Whitsun’s parents were riggit galloway cattle from a well-known farm in the Glenkens. His father was red and his mother was black, and in different ways they conformed to the standards of an often-irregular breed. But Whitsun was born white with red ears, and I liked him immediately. He had a sense of breadth and… Continue reading

Pork and apple is a famous combination, and as the trees begin to rock for the autumn, fruit falls freely into the grass. It’s easy to buy food in for the pigs, and while processed nuts have certainly become more expensive over the last eighteen months, you just can’t beat the simplicity of a complete… Continue reading

An old sow died in the sty, and it didn’t take long for the flies to find her. So I rang the knacker’s yard and the man answered laughing, saying that he only had to shoot a bull and he’d be with me in half an hour.  Sure enough, his wagon drove clattering into the… Continue reading

Back in the spring when anything was possible, a hare came out of the fields to the house. She would have been welcome in the kitchen, but she turned on the doorstep and slipped under a hole in the fence to the kailyard. The grass was well advanced in there, and it hustled around the… Continue reading

I walked on the hills above Aberystwyth in the morning, and the smell of fox was so outrageous that I had to stop and laugh. The stink stayed with me all day, even after three hours in the car and the full width of Wales behind me. Snow lay that evening in the graveyard of… Continue reading

My cousin came up from the south of England, and she said that I was lucky to have so many swallows. Where she lives, the birds have simply vanished over the past ten years, and now there are none. So she stood in my yard with her mouth open like a child and watched swallows… Continue reading

I stopped for lunch, then I lay for a time on my back in the fields below the house. It was tempting to sleep, but the racket of birds and the swell of risen grass was too distracting. So I closed my eyes as the breeze bobbed at my hair, thinking it’s not so bad,… Continue reading

My neighbour’s collie fell to coughing in the spring, and we thought she had an allergy to pollen. She was a nice dog, and she bore the name “Fly”. I would call her “Fly in the Sky” when she came to sit near me. Fly was let to rest for a while, and other dogs… Continue reading

I’ve chewed over the memory of St Oliver Plunkett before. I found traces of the man at the Cathedral of St Patrick in Armagh last year, and I wrote at length about Saints and relics from the perspective of a secular Calvinist. But the statue at Armagh is merely one of many focal points for… Continue reading