Winter part 2
part two of my long-listed entry to the Nature Chronicles Prize
Early last year I entered an essay into the Nature Chronicles Prize, my first and probably only ever entry into a writing competition, and made it onto the long-list of twenty-two out of I don’t know how many entries. It’s a big competition, so I’m quite thrilled to have made it that far and for my work to have been up in the running with some big names and incredible literary talent. I promised I’d share the essay here on Substack as soon as the non-publish clause is up. The whole thing is a bit long for a single Substack post, but I conveniently wrote it in three short parts, which I’m rolling out over three weeks. Part one sets the scene, parts two and three build upon the first. Here is part two. You can find part one here.
A flash of grey-white against the glimmering gold and graphite of the high field at sunset catches my eye. The hen harrier is back, tumbling and chasing low over the open ground. A regular visitor to our rough land on the edge of the uplands, he comes for the hunting, the bleak, winter hills as the moor grass falls back now exposing prey. I stop on my hay rounds to watch him, awestruck and breathless, as he dances with the wind in a stunning display of aerobatic mastery. He rides rising currents high, turns summersaults and twirls, a brilliant dash of startling white in a deep, grey sky, and dives. Then up he goes, up, up, up, away over the forestry where the ravens roost, and north, over the high hill into endless, wintry sky.
Winter comes early to the hill. It comes on howling gales that strip the willows of our high hedge bare and blow the remnants of summer out with raging ferocity; wind that takes your breath, steals the words from your mouth, rattles through your skull and blows the cobwebs out your ears. It comes with driving, pelting rain that stings like icy bullets fired horizontally from black, angry skies. It comes with floods and thunder, with perpetual, heavy downpours that rain and rain until our shallow, saturated, peaty soil can’t take anymore and it bursts gushing and gurgling from flooded wetlands and cascades down the mountain, and the steep, rocky paths, bone dry in the drought of summer, are now running streams, washed clean, with bright green basal star rosettes of large-flowered butterworts clinging to the wet stones like starfish, glistening under the rain.
In the morning, I wade through floods of last night’s rain and the dog, a lover of bog pools and puddles, leaps and splashes exuberantly. The land is sodden, but still the season is unseasonably warm and the low, November sun, casting a glowing backlight through the rising mist, draws sweat from my back as the land steams between showers. There are fresh deer tracks in the mud on the hill path. The sika hind from the other night? The stags reached their roaring crescendo late October, filling the hills with their eerie screams from dawn through dusk, like something between the yowling of a vixen in heat and the wail of a banshee, and the musky, cat piss stink of them still lingers on the paths, sticking through fresh rain, greasy ram rut, bog mud and fox scat. The dog races frantically to and fro, nose to the ground along a rambling network of hoof- and paw-trodden paths that meander through the heather and disappear across our boundary fence into the abandoned, feral land next door, driven demented by the scents of the wild beasts.
We reach the ridge on the lower slopes above the creek, where the sheep are scattered, hidden in the relative rain shelter of thick scrub on the southern slopes. I call out to them, “She-eeep!” and a kestrel, rich chestnut brown and sleek, darts, startled, from a dense, green and spiny stand of European gorse below us. All summer we watched the kestrels dance and hunt over the hill, as they raised and fledged their young. They nested in the holly cliff on the north face of An Cnoc Rua, the Hill of the Red Fox, below the two boulders that sit atop the hill. Two pairs this summer, all four birds seen hunting at once over the high ground in its summer-green verdancy. Sometimes they would break into an airborne, screeching scrawl, over some hapless small mammal torn between their talons.
And the sheep call back, heads popping up from the heather they come like beetles crawling out from the hill in as many colours as the rocks, in slate grey, dappled stone and quartz, as though hewn from the hill they live on. They’re glad of the feeding now: sackfuls of summer hay hauled to them morning and eve to fill the gap in the grass and supplement the winter-green heather and the gorse that will soften after the frost. Aiteann gaelach, the Irish gorse, that grows low to the rocks, that feeds the sheep on the hill in winter and feeds the bumblebees late summer, still clinging onto summer on the southern slopes and lighting up the rocks with a scant scattering of late, fading yellow blooms.
We walk back the long route, the dog and I, off the muddy, trodden path, through knee-high moor grass thatch, silvery bell heather, and dark, evergreen ling sporting pale, rust-pink spires of seed heads. Through old, wet pastures of flaxen, dead moor grass and deep russet, hip-high stands of deciduous, twiggy bog myrtle, its red buds on silver-red stems closed tightly against the coming cold. Around, below the holly cliff where the kestrels nest in summer, the hollies adorned now with big, generous bunches of berries gleaming scarlet against dark, glossed foliage, and thick with ivy hanging heavy and dripping from broken boughs under the strain of its own rain-drenched weight. Badger Cliff, we call it, because we found a badger here, once. A small badger, young, dead, belly down in a puddle of its own vomit. Poisoned? We thought so. We buried it in the deep, dark soil where a lawn of sheep fescue and creeping bent spreads beneath the cliff. Returned it to the land that birthed it.
On we trek over the wet heath, over a thick, saturated carpet of red sphagnum moss under the grass thatch and heather that squishes underfoot, and a climb down the steep, slippery bank to rejoin the path where it cuts through the rocks between low, wet pastures below and the flax ponds above.
The dog flushes a duck out of the long grass by the lower flax pond. “Shhsht, dog! Leave it!” A mallard hen, camouflaged in the same dusky brown as the moor grass, plump and sleek, she takes off flapping into grey mist over the pond and swings northwest, higher, away over the fence at the brow of our boundary line. We found a duck egg shell just about here on one of our first forays onto the land. A blue-green treasure that attested to the wildness and richness of this barren, hill land: wild ducks were nesting in the bog pools! We didn’t know then that these bog pools were old, disused flax ponds, dug out perhaps a century ago, where men would bring the flax grown in nearby fields to soak and soften in the acidic bog water, before breaking apart the fibres and bundling them off to the linen mills. Imagine them, barefoot, pants and shirt sleeves rolled up to their knees and elbows, calf-deep in the shallow, murky bog water at the pool’s edge, labouring under a high, late summer sun. Cool, earthy rain water lapping up the sweat that runs down their arms and drips from their brows, mixing the salt of their labour with the mud of the land. Now, the ponds are overgrown and choked up with purple moor grass, with the same dead thatch that, left un-grazed and unchecked for so long, has smothered the old, damp pastures below and the heath above, and slowed and spread the surface water around the bogs and ponds to perpetuate its own rank, waterlogged swamp.
In September, devil’s bit scabious climbs on leggy stems through the moor grass at its purple-tipped, late-flowering height, just before it turns, and the damp fields and wetlands around the flax ponds bloom into bobbing seas of blue. Now, with the devil’s bit finished and the moor grass fallen back, the ponds full and flooded with November rain, little floating crowfoots, bladderworts and green algae flourish. In the top pond, there are duck trails through the weeds. A pair of teal, we think, hiding in the undisturbed, high grass under the goat willow at the far side of the pond. Shy and elusive, but I’ve seen them, once, circling in to land at dusk.
Third and final part next week…
This piece reminds me of a book by J.A. Baker, called The Peregrine. Beautiful writing.