Bog Myrtle & Peat

Curlews have a dogged determination to go “home” when the breeding season arrives. It’s a touching expression of loyalty, but it borders on being pig-headedly self-destructive when birds fail to accept change in a landscape. They’ll fly over suitable, productive new habitats in order to find old places which haven’t been good for decades –… Continue reading

I’ve spent hours watching those lapwing chicks. They’re fascinating, and time has slipped away through my binoculars as they forage and scamper in the kale stubble. The adult birds have been extremely cautious and caring in every detail, and even the slightest disturbance is met by the male’s raucous wrath. He rises up crying when… Continue reading

Golden plovers cried above the crags and the deep, indented pads of moss which lie beneath the summit cairn. This is one of only three places I know where the birds still breed successfully in Galloway, but it’s almost as far as you could hope to get from civilisation, in a location so high and… Continue reading

We gathered the lambs and brought them all to a pen by the roadside hedge. It’s astonishing to see how these animals have grown in the month since they were born. You’d hardly believe it was possible for creatures to spring out of the ground like dragon’s teeth and chew their way through progress in… Continue reading

The lapwing eggs hatched into soft and comfortable rain. After several days of north, persistent wind, clouds rose up from the sea and smirred between the trees and the hilltops. It was warm, and the cuckoo called from every wood and spur of birch in the parish. The marigolds were full of leverets, and the… Continue reading

The prevailing scent is sap and sand at dusk on the Spanish plain. The endless span of grassland which pours away to Cácares and Badajoz is steeped in dust from the Sahara desert, and while this isn’t Africa, it shares a room with the place. The overlaps tell most at dawn and in the evening… Continue reading

The lapwings which were so heavily trailed on this blog in March have never gone away. I feel sure that three pairs laid eggs and all were washed away in a sudden flood which struck in early April, but they stuck at the job and at least two have tried again. All these birds are… Continue reading

You Hated Spain was published in Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters. It’s a reflection on the poet’s honeymoon in Benidorm with Sylvia Plath in 1956, and it seems like everything that people hate of Hughes is here – the strutting misogynist, the mansplaining boor and the sneering bully. Even the title is an imposition of taste which… Continue reading

There are pools of shade in the rough dehesa, and the holm oaks hunched in galleries of strange, pathetic shapes. You and I might think of oak in vast imperial terms, but these are scrubby robles enanos which operate on a rapid turnover in the rage of an open sun. They’re nothing like our stately trees, and even… Continue reading

Another calf that wouldn’t suck, and I should do away with this cow with her tits like chapel hat pegs. She’s just too big, and her calves find it so hard to suck from her that it wears them down to the bone. They’re keen at first, but with several successive failures, they begin to… Continue reading