Bog Myrtle & Peat

It’s not far along the railway line to Loch Skerrow. There lies the wreckage of an old station stop where the heavy steamers used to pause after their long climb up the Dee valley. Gasping and dry at their labour, the engines braked and had their tanks refilled from the deep, rubbly water of Skerrow… Continue reading

Home, Parish of Kirkgunzeon – 10/4/20 Down along the water where the air is smoked with pollen and dusted soil. Every willow branch is rank with queen bumblebees, and each one moans like a resurgent lawnmower until the land is fairly dinning. Walk a little way through the myrtle beds; watch the stems flicker and… Continue reading

Home, Parish of Kirkgunzeon – 7/4/20 We’ve had swallows in Galloway, and the spring is opening fast. At dawn this morning, I heard willow warblers in the woodland, and a grasshopper warbler reeled trickily in his freshly recovered den. Small signs, but each one valued and marked beneath the trailing wracks of outbound geese. But… Continue reading

Low Airie, Glenkens – 5/4/20 It’s no small job to resurrect the boundaries around Low Airie. It’s taken me a month to repair a mile of drystane dyke, and now I pause to consider the prospect of restoring almost a mile and a half of tired old fence which runs along the top end of… Continue reading

Courthill, Buittle – 5/4/20 One month away from calving, and things look promising. The cows are full, and a few have begun to show a “vessel” in their udders to indicate that time marches on. Having stumbled through two calvings which were staggered, delayed or problematic, I would love to think that things will be… Continue reading

Work and see the weather come. See the cloudscum run above the far hills, then trace it down to fall in the turns and the darkness of a long-bent river, deathly deep. Look up, look down, look back and everything has gone in less time than it takes to think it. Creamy plains of moorland… Continue reading

Low Airie, Glenkens – 2/4/20 I’ve now been working at Low Airie for a month, and it’s been fun to get a feel for the place. Between golden eagles and greyhens, there is plenty to think about on the hill when silence descends. I realise that in all the intrigue and excitement of this place,… Continue reading

The Chayne – Parish of Kirkpatrick Durham – 1/4/20 The hill is hard and powdery. A wind hangs in the north and brings us nothing but cold. It’s hard to tell how the returning curlews have fared because they hate the windchill and the dryness. I see them sometimes, but they are wary and cool… Continue reading

Low Airie, Glenkens – 31/3/20 There have been times when I have imagined that the restoration of a badly crumbled two hundred year old wall is eminently doable. I bite off three hundred yard stretches in a single morning, flinging up the fallen stones and repairing sections of bent or crooked boundary as if it… Continue reading

  En route, Glenkens 29/3/20 In pausing and holding still for half an hour, I parked up the truck and unscrewed the thermos on a wide forest track. This is sometimes a good spot to watch for short eared owls, and with most of a Sunday on my side, I reckoned that it was a… Continue reading