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Tangents
Having recently read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I listened to a radio interview with the writer and actor Mark Gatiss, who has adapted the book for television. I remember Gatiss from The League of Gentlemen, but he has since become the go-to pundit for ideas around horror and the macabre. In a wide ranging conversation with… Continue reading
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Out West
I went out west to shoot woodcock; out beyond Innermessan to the edge of Galloway. Then shoving up through birch trees and bracken banks, I followed the dog and came upon a view of the sea below me. There was Antrim and the Mull of Kintyre, with boats ploughing ruts into the flat black water… Continue reading
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Horror Stories
My autumn has revolved around the novel Starve Acre, by Andrew Michael Hurley. I’ve always been a wimp when it comes to horror in film or literature. I don’t like being scared, but Starve Acre won me over with the promise of something a little closer to home; the idea that horror could be woven… Continue reading
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Louis
I am obsessed with Robert Louis Stevenson. He has become a habit, and it’s costing me a fortune in books. Like many famous authors, Stevenson is surrounded by a fog of mythology and legend. It seems unfair that he should be remembered for children’s stories like Treasure Island and Kidnapped when his work sprawled across… Continue reading
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Adder
In my line of work, progress comes with such ponderous slowness that I am rarely satisfied by it. Unless you take stock and raise a pint now and then, it’s easy to forget that you’ve made any headway at all. Gathering, sorting and loading three beasts into a trailer today, I looked up and found… Continue reading
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New
After several years of writing this blog, I was beginning to feel like I’d made some progress. Working for Grouse had become a substantial piece of work, and it was a pleasure for me to sift through that back-catalogue of records and notes which spanned more than a decade. I believe that there’s sufficient material… Continue reading
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Recovery
The grass turned and the cows faltered. Two mornings of frost fried the blades and spooled them into ribbons which came loose at their roots like slack teeth. Having blown back and forth across the hill with the lightness of moths at the height of midsummer, the beasts were finally pressed into work. They covered… Continue reading
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Beef
The butcher’s shop was broad and clean on the High Street. It was fun to go there as a child. I loved to see the meat laid out in banks and patterns like the start of a board-game, and like every shop I knew back then, the butcher’s had a smell of its own; crisp… Continue reading
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Rat and a rat
“Hello Rat; Hello a rat”. Gripped in a fever, I pull a blanket round my shoulders and watch a creature crackle in the pig sty straw. I repeat those words to myself over and over; hello Rat; hello a rat, And it occurs to me that there are two meanings here. And I say Go… Continue reading
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Autumn
You’ll have seen the daylight fading? And you’ll know that dawn has become a workday normality; that night falls when you’ve hardly made sense of your evening? Autumn is a fair time to walk in the darkening hills and think of all that sunlight you pissed up the wall in June and July. Remember how… Continue reading
About
“Shout on, Morgan. You’ll be nothing tomorrow”
Swn y galon fach yn torri, 1952
Also at: https://andtheyellowale.substack.com
Bog Myrtle & Peat 