Bog Myrtle & Peat

Get over the Merrick and down its back-side towards Kirriereoch and the bogs of Mullwarchar. It’s deep country out there on the border with Ayrshire; cool and spectacular in the mid-winter sun. We’re not allowed to talk about the eagles which live nearby, but suffice it to say that heavy birds make for mighty viewing Continue reading

The sun rose slow on a cold morning’s run through the forest. It’s a route I follow almost every day, and after the overnight hardness of stars it’s liable to come up icy in the morning. As I came around a distant corner, golden backlit breath rose through a stickle of birch trees. It was Continue reading

Ongoing experiments with bale grazing have shown more promising fruit. Set against the many advantages I’d seen so far, I also grumbled that the beasts tend to waste more when bales are rolled out and unfurled in the field. They trample it down and shit on it, and afterwards refuse to eat silage which they Continue reading

I leaped to condemn Henry Williamson last winter, and I’ve been regretting it ever since. He’s a far more complicated author than I thought he was, and I was too keen to damn him for his politics. In working my way through his Flax of Dreams novels, I find more to catch my eye than I had Continue reading

The National Park consultation is “underway”, but it’s hard to make sense of the process when so much depends upon whether or not we actually want to be having this conversation. A questionnaire which recently fell through my letterbox not only asked if I was keen for designation, but also sought my views on how Continue reading

The grass failed when the hard weather came, and now it’s certainly time to think of feeding cattle. Of course it’s tempting to delay the first feed of winter for as long as possible for the obvious reason that I only have a certain amount of silage. At this stage of the autumn, it’s hard Continue reading

The most famous literary representations of Galloway have been sketched out by authors from elsewhere. As a written landscape, we’re probably most widely known as the setting for John Buchan’s celebrated The Thirty-Nine Steps – drawn from this novel, the catch-quote “I fixed on Galloway as the best place to go” is sometimes regurgitated as Continue reading

You don’t just go to a museum and find what you want. That would be impossible. Instead, you’re forever distracted by better and more interesting tangents.  Following a thread on the Celts, I went to see the famous genius loci statuette at the Tully House Museum in Carlisle. Genii locorum are equivalent to household gods Continue reading

There was a rustle in the fallen ginkgo leaves, and a glimpse of movement through darkened railings. I looked for more detail and found myself almost nose-to-nose with a fox. In a glow of the streetlights, he sat up like a traffic cone and showed me his breast, stretching slightly and sending a ripple of Continue reading

It’s not easy to write about grouse shooting anymore, but it is interesting to think about how people respond to controversy and the threat of “enemies”. Because when I shared a recent article about misinformation on social media, I was widely regarded as an enemy. Perhaps it was naïve of me to open some of Continue reading