Bog Myrtle & Peat

I was shelled with brick bits and the fragments of mortar. I was turned about and the hills roared to break like waves in the darkness. Wet wraps of black plastic slapped on the windows, and always on with the moaning pound of heavy seas. Now and then a moon loomed smiling above the wreckage,… Continue reading

There’s a surge of momentum to write in the moment and pin down the smallest details of each new experience. It’s compelling, but sometimes the impetus founders and the mist comes down. You might have work to do; meetings to attend. You can’t always reach for a pen, and I start to think that growing… Continue reading

Last night I saw two foxes fight in the moonrise. I ran to the gate’s cheek to meet the squall of the squirming bodies and the white tags of their tails. They battled cattily for a moment, then rose in a pair like steeples standing face to face and screaming with their heads sheared and… Continue reading

Only as a brief postscript, it’s worth including this photograph of the vegetation on the hill where the cattle have been. In forty years without grazing, this purple moor grass had grown into a maze of deep and heavy tussocks. Each summer, new leaves would rise up and fall down uneaten to build a mat… Continue reading

It’s been a better year on the hill. For several accidental reasons, the cows went out more than a month later than they did in 2020. The grass was there to meet them, and they swam into it. I dropped them off on June the third and they’ve never once looked back. Two factors have… Continue reading

I had a dead calf in the spring. I never mentioned it, at least in part because I know that I’m too willing to be maudlin. It’s a bad habit. I should amend it, but in a world without many markers, that calf has begun to follow me; a creature that never walked and revealed… Continue reading

We observed the Twelfth and killed birds because their time had come. How normal it was to see the hill grass thrown and churning in the wind; how like this month to feel rain and clouds gouging the tops like a sound of crumbled pumice. When I was a child, I’d look forward to this… Continue reading

I share my birthday with Sir Walter Scott. Having recently passed the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Scott’s birth, it’s been fascinating to see one of my favourite writers under the microscope in the media, particularly as we try to reassess his cultural and literary significance for modern Scotland. In the BBC documentary In… Continue reading

Did you ever hear of such a year for swallows? The yard is loud with them now in the early days of autumn, and the second broods have begun to join the first on the wires between the house and the telegraph poles. Pity the sparrowhawk who comes here hunting in the buchts and the… Continue reading

When the rain came at last, it found us by chance in the street in the town in a crowd. It came in a shade which rode over the quarry and the river to the kirk and mill in sheets. We stood against it, feeling the hiss and the turning leaves as it rushed through… Continue reading