On Place & Nature
Red soil
On a map, Cato road runs perfectly straight. In Durban, it rolls over two steep hills in quick succession, so you have to accelerate on the first downhill to make the second incline. As a child it felt like free-fall, a rollercoaster taking us home.
The Stena Immaculate
A few miles out at sea on the horizon a cargo ship is heading south. It is stacked with red and blue containers like a child’s building blocks. Container ships are so common on the North Sea I don’t pay them much attention, although sometimes in stormy weather they set a course through a deep channel close to shore, and often I see their lights at night, passing the rocky Farne Islands, where the famous Longstone lighthouse beams its warning.
The vulnerability of life
A flash of silver catches my eye. Ten centimetres long, narrow, straight, a bright tube of tin foil lies on the sand at my feet, at an angle to the tide’s fizzing edge. I bend to peer at it. A pale blue sequin pinned by a deep black dot stares back at me. There is a moment’s frisson: life recognising life.
National Park politics
The Scottish Government wants Galloway to be designated as a National Park. The idea has caused tremendous excitement in the far southwest of Scotland, and it’s even made national news – but it’s also clear that Galloway doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s called Dumfries and Galloway now; a much larger bloc which was created in 1974 when Wigtownshire, Kirkcudbrightshire and Dumfriesshire were run together as a single entity.
Living memory
There is an oak tree, Quercus Robur, which I have known for nearly my whole life. It stands in my late parents’ garden, higher than their house, an ancient, bifurcated grey trunk, split from the base, its crazy mass of zigzag branches underpinning a glorious round green crown. Now bound in dark ivy and sunk waist-deep in an overgrown beech hedge, the tree seethes with life.
The Darkening
It is dusk, ‘the darkening’ as we say here in Northumberland. The tide is flowing, a fierce gale blows from the north, sending curtains of rain to lash the windows and, beyond, the sea sounds one endless, low bass roar as it creeps toward the breakwater. Out there, the air tastes dank and salty. It is difficult to tell where rain begins and sea spume en…
A calf for winter
Autumn, last year, found me in a state of nervousness. A series of minor misjudgements over a year prior to that had led to a situation in which a small number of my Galloway cows were out of sync with the rest of the herd.
Oysters in Doggerland
January has blown in on a cold north wind this week, bringing on its wings, the last of woodcock, their beady black eyes in our hedgerows, and feeding on the worms at night.