Bog Myrtle & Peat

Henry Williamson made no secret of his inspiration for Tarka the Otter. In a letter to TE Lawrence, he explained that he’d based the story on a book by the Cornish writer JC Tregarthen. Celebrated in his day as a sporting naturalist, Tregarthen’s work focussed on the landscape of the far southwest – he wrote Continue reading

It’s hard work rolling out bales for the beasts. I’m glad I only have to do one at a time – if I was feeding eight or ten bales in a morning, I’d be getting sick of it. That’s an issue of scale, and what seems to be working for me is not an automatic Continue reading

The Dream of Fair Women is the third book in Henry Williamson’s The Flax of Dream series, and it strained my interest in this writer to the very edge of breaking point.  The Beautiful Years was brightly winsome and Dandelion Days offered moments of excited nostalgia – but both were rooted in presentations of nature and rural landscapes. Even Continue reading

This farm was laid along old southwesterly lines. Everything here is designed to accommodate the steady winds which ride inland from the Irish Sea. Where they can’t be fought against, they’re avoided. The buildings with the biggest doors face north, and even though the southern sun is needed for the sake of work and hope Continue reading

Thirty five thousand people passed through the doors of Bog Myrtle and Peat in 2024. I’ve published 117 new posts this year, bringing the all-time total to more than 2,000 articles since the project began in 2010. I know all this because the web host sent me a summary on Christmas Day, and in a Continue reading

Now that the geese have returned in good numbers, it’s part of the start of each day to listen for their arrival on the fields below the house. It’s been too mild for the mile-wide skeins of pink-footed geese which come here in colder years, but a hard core of local greylags has been augmented Continue reading

There’s been fresh controversy in the National Park debate since it was revealed in a Ferret article that aspects of the NO-Park campaign have been funded by a handful of wealthy landowners. It seems to make a nonsense of claims that the NO-parkers are a grassroots, community-led organisation, suggesting instead that they’re buoyed by a Continue reading

As The Beautiful Years drew to a close, we left the nine-year-old Willie Maddison locked into a fantasy of wildlife and friendship with the local farmer’s lad Jack Temperley. Dandelion Days picks up the thread after an interval of six years, but an author’s note explains that while these books were written in sequence during the early 1920s, the Continue reading

It’s been fun to play with a new blog at “And The Yellow Ale”, and I’m slowly working out how publishing works at substack. During the last few weeks on that platform, I’ve published a series of short-to-mid-length essays on cattle, art and wildlife, and I’ve also been updating and resharing some of the 2,000 Continue reading

There have been growing calls for a referendum on a National Park in Galloway. It seems like an obvious step, particularly since there’s so much confusion and distrust around how the consultation’s being undertaken. Even if the referendum was merely advisory, it would give people a sense that their voices are being heard by the Continue reading