Bog Myrtle & Peat

I could only see her shadow, and at a glance I took her for some passive thrush or dove. But the roar of the hens made me turn my head and squint down into the sunshine from my office chair; a female goshawk slammed into the small gathering of bantams at the bottom of the garden,… Continue reading

It’s well worth reporting on the progress made by the trees I planted in 2010 at the back of the farm. This three acre enclosure has been rank with bracken for as long as I can remember, and it serves no real conservation purpose beyond providing the foxes with a handy bolt hole or two… Continue reading

After an excellent trip down to Yorkshire for the game fair, it seems a good moment to show off the fruits of my retail indulgence with the above picture. I am very pleased with my new half-price Greys 9’6″ #4 trout rod, and all the more smug to get my hands on a copy of Derek Ratcliffe’s… Continue reading

Since returning from the Galloway Hills, it has been a busy week of roe and rain, but it’s worth quickly mentioning that I’ll be at the CLA game fair tomorrow (Friday), and it would be good to meet any readers of this blog as I work my way through a shopping list which includes a… Continue reading

In very brief, it is certainly worth mentioning a stunning fishing trip deep into the wild terrain of the Galloway/Ayrshire border over the weekend. It would take several blog articles to adequately capture the full delight of three days on the water amongst shoals of brown trout, tumbling eagles and the eerie lowing of black throated divers, but… Continue reading

It has been interesting to read through the feedback from my recent post about windfarms and forestry, particularly since it has raised some interesting new ideas about the imbalance between forestry and renewable development. From a landowner’s perspective, the various voices from within the renewables world have spent the past ten years dangling enormous sums… Continue reading

Couldn’t resist quickly posting this picture of a wheatear chick found on the road this afternoon. He must have stepped out of the nest a matter of hours before I saw him, and his wings were taking some getting used to. They flopped around beside him, and he moved around in a fumbling, foolish series… Continue reading

Windfarms have become the new Galloway buzzword. Nowhere else in Scotland has attracted such a huge amount of attention from the wind developers, and over the past ten years on the Chayne, over a dozen different companies have expressed their interest in one capacity or another. The various development reps have not exactly covered themselves in… Continue reading

It has been an odd year for drying peat. The May wind was thorough and chased away the water, but since then the damp and the rain have soaked in to parts where the skin had not formed, and many of the most promising peats are now as crisp as biscuits on top while soggy and soluble below. I… Continue reading

It’s fascinating to see how birds and wildlife respond to a bad summer. Driving out of Dumfries yesterday, I passed a female lapwing with a brood of two day-old chicks at heel, wandering carefully through a recently mown silage field. Nearby, a flock of twenty full-grown lapwings looked on; one of the hotchpotch gangs of immature birds and… Continue reading