Bog Myrtle & Peat

Still hot off the back of The Mabinogion and the fragments of Taliesin, I can’t escape the significance of ash trees as an icon of warfare. It’s said that in the Dark Ages, ash was grown around farm buildings and villages so that local folk would always have ready access to poles for spears, and… Continue reading

I’ve been surprised by the number of lapwings I’ve found this spring, and it’s been revealing to spend more time around these birds. Unlike curlews, it seems like lapwings are less faithful to a point of origin. In some years, they won’t return at all to formerly useful sites – at other times, they’ll appear… Continue reading

We’re now into the curlew’s failure phase. The day before I went away, two pairs were displaying towards the village. Better still, I saw them both mating and one pair actively shaping a nest in the rushes. It seemed like the arrival of eggs was imminent, but a week later these pairs have gone. Nesting… Continue reading

In the autumn when the going was better than it is now, I sent my sheep across the river to get them in lamb. In an uncharacteristic moment of madness, my neighbour had bought a fancy Ryeland tup which looked like a teddy bear, and he was already regretting the decision. He thought it was… Continue reading

I met a surprising degree of resistance when I came to launch a curlew survey earlier in the month. It’s risky to put your head above the parapet at the best of times, but curlew conservation has become steadily stickier over the last few years. Some people regard the issue as a battleground by proxy… Continue reading

I’m not sure what “Southern Uplands” are, or whether those words are a useful way to describe something that shouldn’t bear a single name. I know my home and I know Dumfriesshire less well. My knowledge of the Borders diminishes with distance so that Hawick’s familiar and Kelso’s another world, but there’s far more to… Continue reading

The sun sank stifling to the reeds in a margin of dusk. All the warming day I’d held my peace on the tarmac roads until I fell at last to stop on the Levels with the hawthorns already in flower to show how far from home I’d come. I was down in the Outrageous South,… Continue reading

It’s been hard to find curlews over the last few weeks. Not only have the birds turned out to be more scarce than I had feared, but I begin to see that there are also some behavioural tricks that tip the scales against the would-be surveyor. In a cold spring like this, breeding pairs seem… Continue reading

It was too dry when our lapwings came in March, and then the fields were sprayed with slurry. The birds went away on a cold night, and I hoped they’d come back but they never did. Now it seems like the grass is too long for them to have a second chance, and I’m sorry… Continue reading

I found a stranger in the close. He’d come to introduce himself as my new neighbour, and also to find out where the stopcock was for his water. It was good to meet him, but in truth I’m not yet done with my old neighbour who died last spring. Perhaps the odds were already stacked… Continue reading