Bog Myrtle & Peat

It’s no wonder my hands are cold when the meat falls off them and the veins stand up between my knuckles. There’s nothing left to keep me warm, and the ice bites into my joints and my skin tears like tissue paper on the smallest snag. This never used to happen. I was tight and… Continue reading

Revisiting the infamous film Straw Dogs on a cold winter’s evening, I was gripped by the re-emergence of themes which I’ve found steadily more interesting over the last few years. It’s certainly tempting to write an exhaustive essay on the ins and outs of a complex and messy film, but it feels more relevant to… Continue reading

Hung up on a growing fixation with Anglo Saxon language and culture, it was inevitable that I should have been drawn to watch The Dig, which was released on Netflix last week. Based around the excavations at Sutton Hoo, the film was heavily promoted on the radio last week. I listened with delight to one… Continue reading

I’ve seen Orion before, but never from this angle through a byre vent on the coldest night of the year. As the hours moaned and the cleanings chilled in the straw like pudding, the old familiar stars rolled out of sight and new ones took their place. The first piglets fell into the darkness and… Continue reading

The clarity is cleaner in retrospect, and I’m glad I did nothing to record the bellwether days between Christmas and mid-January. There was hardly a cloud in the sky for three whole weeks. When the fronts came at last it was merely to snow and shift the aspect forward. In another year, I would’ve wasted… Continue reading

You say “I’ve not seen many geese this year”, and folk say “That’s because it hasn’t been cold”. But they don’t say why that matters, and the truth is that nobody knows. We think back to the last time that geese were here in good numbers, and we realise that was ten years ago when… Continue reading

They came to clean the ditches in 1989. All the farmers chipped in for the job because there’s no use cleaning the top of the glen unless the bottom’s done too. So the digger worked up from the village to the caulside of Barlochan where the burn splits and my father’s half comes up to… Continue reading

I’ve loved Seamus Heaney for years, ever since I found a copy of his poem The Early Purges at school. His work felt heavy and relevant to me, and as I read further into his verse and prose, I began to think I’d found a comfortable home. And it’s only ninety miles from my farm… Continue reading