Bog Myrtle & Peat

Having been visiting in-laws in Cornwall over Christmas, I’ve returned with a mighty list of chores on the agenda with my first cows coming early next week. I committed to buy two six month old black riggit galloway heifers in September, I now have the chance to buy two more before the cattle float is loaded… Continue reading

I’ve been putting time into painting since late summer, trying my hand at oil paints after years of messing around with gouache, pastels and watercolour. I’m increasingly happy with how the paintings are turning out, and even developed sufficient confidence to have one printed as a Christmas card. A detail from it is reproduced above, but… Continue reading

Trusting the Met Office, I made a snap decision to attempt a wigeon flight this morning. The weather has been so dire throughout December that I have failed to get down on the merse so far, and with Christmas rushing in, I needed to seize my moment. Sure enough, the forecast predicted a clear dawn which… Continue reading

It’s interesting to see how many woodcock are now in residence in Galloway, despite the fact that it has been so astonishingly mild throughout December. Woodcock numbers usually build enormously after a period of cold weather in the East, but even with this slushy, half-formed excuse of a winter, there was still more than enough to keep… Continue reading

Nothing is worse than “kit reviews” from bloggers (particularly when you suspect that a good supply of freebies might have tainted the reviewer’s objectivity), but I can’t resist mentioning a new purchase which came in the post a fortnight ago. The Bison Bushcraft “guide shirt” is an excellent piece of kit from top to bottom. I might… Continue reading

Can’t resist a slight note of frustration at coming across a picture from 2011 of the first ermine I ever caught on the Chayne. It was a tremendous curiosity at the time, and with only the slightest brown spectacles around her eyes, the female stoat was almost pure white. The huge majority of the stoats… Continue reading

The only signs of life in the snow were the sheep and a pair of ravens flying carefully past on bent wings. The fearsome East wind blew rags of purple-grey cloud across the hill, sometimes bringing visibility down to less than forty yards, and my grand plan of lying out to spy for a fox… Continue reading

I never give much thought to the amount of work that has gone into this blog over the past few years, and I almost never read back through the old archives from when it started in 2009. It has become a really nice record of all my struggles and strife over the years, and I… Continue reading

Despite all the publicity given to the shocking floods in Cumbria and South West Scotland, it has been hard to pick out anything new or remarkable in my corner of the country over the weekend. The days began to elide into a low-contrast blur of grey and black during the middle of last week, and… Continue reading

Following on from recent posts about the curlew, I received an email on Friday from the BTO regarding a new project into their decline. Within an hour or two, I had been copied in to a response written by Dick Bartlett of British Moorlands, whose work on grouse represents some of the most innovative and exciting new practical… Continue reading