I’m told that Inis Mór is one of the best places to see wildflowers in June. Lying out in Galway Bay, the island has been protected from modern agriculture by geography and geology, both of which have conspired to keep back ploughs and sprays and sudden shoves of change. It’s really just a chunk of limestone in the sea, and that stone is so flakily abundant that the whole place seems to scrape and rattle as you walk upon it.

Wildflowers seem to love the alkali soils on Inis Mór, and they appear to grow bigger and more wonderful in an explosion of nutrient-rich soil. Even in August when most of the plants have started to decline, there are still purple drifts of knapweed and scabious; dabs of bloody cranesbill and always a glitter of eyebright in the short grass. Bracken is hard and heavy, brambles are fattening and the first catkins are emerging from hazel scrub which seems to spring out of the slightest hairline crack in the ground. For all its rockiness, it’s astonishingly rich and fruitful.

During the course of my visit I saw entire fields of wild carrot and yellow rattle where it might actually have been hard to insert a single additional blade of grass. I also saw entire fields of bare stone - the so-called limestone pavements which grind in diagonal lines across the island; sheets of smooth stone which run for an acre before cracking deeply and then running for three acres more. In certain of these fields it’s like a moonscape; sheets of rock littered with crumbs and fragments of more rock and sometimes a donkey walking slowly through the mess of it.

Over many centuries, islanders have turned this huge abundance of stones into a shoulder-high lattice of dykes which runs from one shore to the other. Those dykes are found in every shape and size and pattern, some a dog could walk through without bending, others so tightly mortared with scraps of smaller stone that they’re like the wall of a house. These dykes lie in a fishscale pattern of alleys, fields, flakes, spouts and corners, but it would be hard to imagine that any of the cleanly delineated fields could amount to more than half an acre in extent. It’s a maze, and now and then a cow or a pony is resting its chin on a dyketop and watching you move past. It might be only thirty metres away, and yet it could take an hour to get there if you didn’t know which turns to take.

The ferry across from Doolin had been overhung with gannets and skuas and the flabby emergence of basking sharks in the spray, heightening a sense of deep-sea adventure. But in fact, Inis Mór is well established on a major tourist circuit bringing boatloads of visitors across from Galway. They’re mainly Americans, and as you watch them move through tourist shops at the ferry terminal, it’s not immediately clear what they want from this place. It’s probably not wildflowers, but the old aesthetic of dykes and donkeys is a particularly powerful draw here. Even if this particular pitch of stonework is pretty unique to Clare and the Aran Islands, it’s become a shorthand for all of Ireland.

Inis Mór lies at the core of an Irish aesthetic of “life as it used to be”, and it’s the location for parts of Father Ted and the recent film Banshees of Inisherin. Despite the fact that most young people in Ireland live in the cities and in their projection of modern Ireland as a progressive left-wing nation, many still have an ambivalent relationship with tweed flat caps, collarless shirts and landscapes like these. It follows that the American tourists’ confusion is matched with Irish uncertainty because much of what visitors expect or “know” of Ireland is based on an early Twentieth-Century vision of small-town poverty, manual labour and whiskey. That’s not the reality of modern Ireland, but it’s still an uncomfortably recent memory.

When Americans come to Scotland in order to connect with their roots, they’re usually fishing for an experience of eighteenth century Jacobitism - tartan and castles in the mist. It’s easy to sell that as a product because it’s been dead for centuries. Modern Scotland can sell ancient Scotland safely as part of a clean transaction, but expectation and reality in Ireland are still tied up together - and neither hold the upper hand. Even as I type this, there are still donkeys and waistcoats and men mumbling into their Guinness by the fire, probably complaining about a new generation of reckless, good-for-nothing kids who have an equal claim on their sense of an Irish self.

Overhearing conversations between tourists and local folk, it seemed likely that Americans were more willing to talk about their own lives in America than they were keen to hear about life on Inis Mór. They dabbed around the edges talking noisily across their bored children, and maybe the pleasure will come later when they talk about what they did and saw “in the old country”. In the moment, they only seemed shrill and overwrought - and to be fair, if all my family had come from Galloway but I had never seen it myself, I would probably find it hard to make a connection to the place too, no matter how much I wanted it.

The cheese-maker’s dairy was an accidental discovery in the hills above Covadonga in Northern Spain. I was taken there by a man with an accent so thick that I couldn’t understand him, and I was more or less held captive until I bought some cheese. Thankfully it was excellent stuff - hard and crumbly with a bruise of blue veins and a gentle smokiness through the heart of it. I could eat that stuff for hours, so everybody was happy in the end.

I had stumbled upon producers of Gamoneu del Valle, a heritage variety of cheese from the mountains of Asturias. Part of my hijacked tour ran through several of the important techniques which are required to ensure that this cheese meets the protected conditions of its DOP (what we call PDO in the UK, “protected designation of origin”).

Amongst many details, Gamoneu has to be smoked for a very specific period of time with hardwood smoke and aged alongside others of its kind in a particular cave. Maybe we’re all familiar with the rules and regulations which accompany food and drinks which are produced in certain places, and I can get on board with so much of this - even when it sometimes errs towards pedantry and fussiness. It’s often just a way of ensuring that big commercial entities can’t just sweep everything off the map - and so even if it does sound a little picky sometimes, it’s all for a good cause.

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The bull I had was very keen. He’d often jump the fence into the neighbour’s fields, and once I caught him in the act of escaping with his front legs on one side of the wire and his hind legs on the other. He became less ready to roam when I electrified that fence, and less ready still when I swapped my battery energizer for the mains. But it never killed his enthusiasm altogether, as my neighbour found to his cost.

The field where I kept that bull is surrounded on two sides by another property. Other bulls and different cows live all around me during the summer months, and if that sounds like an invitation for problems, I have to explain that I can hardly avoid it. My neighbour has a decent-si

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When I was the age that my son is now, I was so excited by the idea of shooting that I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it. The start of the grouse shooting season figured so enormously on my horizon that it completely overtowered my birthday, which happens at around the same time. Grouse and dogs and shooting were everything to me - and the rest of the year was just filling in time.

The shooting which used to excite me so much was a very modest affair - a five mile walk around a rough hill at home with my uncles and cousins and their motley array of collies. We never shot more than three or four brace of birds, even on years when they did well and we might have seen twenty or thirty. Growing up, I made a job for myself around the subject of grouse and I learned that this sort of shooting operates at all kinds of scales - and the people who are willing to pay for advisory work on grouse moors expect rather more from their shooting than the odd grouse here and there.

Big estates might shoot two or four hundred grouse in a day, and I’ve seen a broad spread of grouse shooting at all shapes and scales across a broad range of countryside from Denbighshire to Caithness. To some extent, I return to shooting at home as a matter of personal preference, not because I haven’t loved shooting driven days when the powerful coveys blast between the butts in Yorkshire and Angus - but really because it’s a fine way to remind myself of who I am. I love the steady, careful process of working my own dog across heather and moss which smells of the place I love best in the world, and the shooting is really just an excuse to engage with it.

I can’t make my son love the same things that I do, but I can run them past him and see what he thinks - and now that he’s old enough to walk a longer distance and remain upright, he came along with me and several friends this year. He loved the dogs and the guns, and at one moment when a pointer was latched on the scent of a grouse at our feet, it was a buzz to realise that he was just as hooked as I was. The covey flushed, I killed one and then my son ran forward to pick up the soft, blossomy bird from its hole in the heather. We sniffed that grouse and we splayed its feet; we talked about its white eyelids and its red eyebrows and the million varieties of caramels and toffees and chocolates and coffees in its wing.

But the day was brought to an early conclusion when one of my friends slipped and twisted his knee in the heather. Another friend had already cried off on the ascent to the moor because he couldn’t handle it. There’s no way to get a vehicle up there, so the only way in involves an almost vertical climb through rocks and bracken for almost eight hundred feet. Blowing hard, my friend had called it quits after half an hour. He was a little embarrassed, but he reckoned that if he couldn’t make it onto the hill, he would never make it far once he was up.

The second withdrawal reduced our numbers from six to four - and if I’m being completely honest, I have to reveal that it might well have been related to age - because when I’m talking about my friends here, the implication is that I’m describing a group of people in their late thirties and early forties. The truth is that shooting is staring down the barrel of a demographic cul-de-sac. Despite extensive efforts to get young people involved in the sport, it is the preserve of older folk - and I am at least fifteen (if not twenty) years younger than any of my friends on the hill last week.

Given that it’s a hard trek with a heavy gun, it’s no wonder that after many years in pursuit of the same hill walking, numbers are dwindling. We’re down to six nowadays, but we used to be nine. Of the two who dropped out this year, I doubt that both will be back in 2027. It’s noticeable that while many of my shooting friends have kids in their twenties, none of them are sufficiently interested to come along. They have no problem with the ethics or morality of shooting - they’re just not that fussed - and that’s not a problem for shooting alone. Every sport, pastime and interest-group is battling to attract and retain the attention of young people, and maybe that’s a topic for another day. In the meantime, I’m used to being the baby on shoot days, and maybe I’m odd for having embraced this sport so wholeheartedly. I’m certainly unusual for trying to pass it on for another generation - but in involving my son it seems horribly unlikely that he’ll grow up with a gang of likeminded mates of a similar age to shoot and fish together. Even if he loves it, the social side is hard to sustain in silent isolation.

And that’s where pressure to curtail or ban grouse shooting starts to feel unnecessarily shrill and vociferous. In its current direction of travel, grouse shooting will die anyway, not through legislative change or activism but because the number of people who want to shoot grouse is simply withering. It’s a sad irony that the steadiest and most defensible kinds of shooting which I grew up with are probably going to die first - because that sport is based upon adventure, physical fitness and the willingness to walk for miles with no guarantee of ever firing a shot. What I learned of this shooting was gleaned from an older generation which is literally fading away nowadays. Adventurous shooting is survived by the popularised spectacle of grouse shooting as a sport for the fat and opulent which is easier to attack because this has become a “luxury activity for wealthy fat-cats” who are driven around the hills in brand new offroad vehicles. The “rough and ready” is almost gone, overlaid by the smooth and commercial.

I take my hat off to those who invest time, effort and love into their grouse - but many of them will agree that it’s become an old man’s game - and that a tendency towards driven high-end shooting is one reflection of an old man’s tendency towards comfort. At the current rate of legal and demographic change, there will be no grouse shooting for my son to pursue into his twenties and thirties. If there is (and if he chooses to do it), he’ll be up there on his own - and it’s more than likely that he will never be able to take his own son to shoot grouse on the hills where his dad and his grandad and his great grandad all shot grouse in August. Given that this was such an important and formative experience for me, I’m sorry that he’ll miss it - but even if this was never going to be the flag he chose to fly above himself in the future, he’s seen my flag now - he knows you need one, no matter what it is.

I went to Spain to learn more about Asturiana de los Valles cattle. I already had a loose idea of what they were and how they worked, but nothing beats seeing these things for yourself. Having found several beautiful beasts on the roadside above the town of Covadonga, I got out of the car to take some pictures. There was gentle rain in the air; hardened bracken, mould and the edge of autumn through the shadow of sweet chestnut trees. Ravens clocked out of sight, and the hazel trees were heavy with a fattening crop of nuts.

I have passed through this part of Spain before, although never for long enough to make sense of what I found there. It’s Celtic country par excellence, and the ancient ties between Scotland and Spain feel particularly strong in the heather-strewn mountains. I was hardly there for long enough this time either, but at least I was making a start on the place when a pickup truck clattered into view around a bend in the road above me. A heavily built old man was driving in my direction, so I got out of the way. As he passed, a swirl of cigarette smoke rolled from the open window and he gruffly demanded who I was. I said that I was a farmer from Scotland, and that I had come to see cows like these – the honey-red beasts which had risen to slouch across bramble beds at the roadside. The man nodded. “These are my cows”, he said.

Then he said “Get in”.

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Three quad bikes were stolen from this parish, and six more from out along the coast. For reasons best known to themselves, the police initially decided to treat each theft as something different, even though the same things had been stolen from neighbouring farms on the same nights. The crimes were therefore not something that happened to our community – each theft was an injury inflicted upon individual people, and there was no consolation in realising that it was nothing personal.

Theft like this would hardly be news in many parts of the country, but it’s shocking here. When I have mentioned those quad bikes to friends in England, their main surprise is the fact that I am bothered by it. They say that as long as everything is insured, it doesn’t matter - but even where theft has become boringly transactional, we can’t forget that everybody has gone through this experience for the first time - and even the smallest theft takes things away which can’t be claimed for afterwards.

After a fortnight, word had spread far enough for us to conclude that eighteen bikes, five trailers and four trucks had gone. That’s no small haul, and as each farmer pooled the scraps of his own information into a shared resource, a clearer picture emerged. Security camera footage had picked up images of three men in their twenties, each one wearing a balaclava and moving fast through yards and barns. One farmer had fallen asleep while watching the news at 10 o’clock. When the sound of the weather report woke him at 10:35, he looked in the yard and everything was gone. Another farmer had a security camera set up above his road end where it meets the street. He watched his quad bike buzz away into the darkness.

On the high road to Kirkcudbright, a farmer chased after the thieves and was disturbed when they stopped and got out. Wearing masks and carrying axe handles, they shouted at him to go away. So he did, and when I later spoke to an Irish friend with traveller roots, he tried to explain this danger as nothing serious. They wouldn’t have hurt him, he said. They would just have put him down on the ground. From a position of fraught cowardice, I would struggle to tell “being hurt” and “being put down on the ground” apart. I guess that for the thieves, the difference is “no hard feelings” - and all that’s required is paperwork and insurance claims.

If that’s your approach, a panicked defence of your property on the basis that it’s your property probably sounds daft. Don’t resist - just replace. When theft is normal, what could be more straightforward? But when theft is new, there are always hard feelings.

Reading about the history of man’s relationship with the horse, it’s interesting to learn that archaeological evidence of horse-riding only begins in Europe during the 1^st Millenium BC. Measured against progress in agriculture which began during the 10^th Millenium BC, that seems very late, but it’s an important distinction between working horses and riding them. You can work horses on farms for generations without needing to ride them. Riding is specifically associated with expressions of power. Horse riding was driven into Europe when Scythian raiders descended from the Eurasian steppe and destroyed peaceful villages in the Balkans and eastern Europe. There’s a clear correlation between these raids and the rise of horse-riding in Europe which translates as an arms race. How many times are you willing to be attacked by horsemen until you become one yourself and start fighting back? Conquest and violence are some of the darker drivers of change and progress… but can we call it progress when it’s change we didn’t want?

Since the thieves came, my Irish friend has now bought three dogs for his yard – white alsatians with ice-blue eyes. He showed me a picture of them on his phone, and that was as close as I would ever choose to see them. He said they were good because they barked first. There’s no point having a dog that just attacks, and I felt like a child because that thought had never occurred to me. I agreed that it makes good sense with the same uncomfortable resignation as I would plan for what I should do in the event of a house fire.

Later, the same friend said that the thieves’ luck will run out sometime. Speaking from unspecified experience, he said that once your momentum is moving on a job, theft carries so many variables that it’s often just a matter of luck; good timing, bluff, confidence and things which go according to plan. I don’t know how he knows this, but now that he has things of his own which can be stolen, it sounded like he was using old skills against themselves. Their luck will run out long before the police will ever catch them, he said. I had assumed that their luck would run out when the police caught them, but that was not his meaning. The police won’t catch them, he said. And he laughed and then he changed the subject.

It’s a wonder that more things aren’t stolen here. Little is locked, and I am always quietly surprised when I travel to other parts of the country and see farm machinery wrapped in chains and secured with round-the-clock cameras. There’s really no good reason to film anybody without their consent, although I begin to feel like I’m in a minority for thinking this. The people who make those cameras claim to be selling “peace of mind”, but the evidence they’re gathering is almost never admissible to support a prosecution anyway. Cameras don’t stop the bad guys – they just drag the good guys into a mess of suspicion. They lower the tone and create a bitter mood of surveillance. I suppose you get used to it, but I can’t help wondering if life in the shadow of constant invasion is very much fun. In fact, I would guess that it’s no fun at all, and really just evidence of how we can learn to accept shit as normality.

Knowing that thieves are at work in this place, I catch myself darkening. I see a van on the track and my impulse is to gulp and clench and swear between my teeth. Turning the thought over in my mind, I see people in the street and wonder if they know anything about things getting stolen – if they might be the people who are doing this. Then I’m being ugly myself, not because I genuinely believe that I will crack this case myself – more because there’s a bad smell on the breeze, and the thought is about me. And maybe you could laugh and say that we’ve all been living in a chocolate box – that it’s time for Galloway to get real and wise up to the world, but it takes a hard heart to say that and believe it. The worst thing we so often say to children is “grow up”.

It was coming on for dawn when the pig was led shirking from his pen to the block where he would be killed. They’d placed a loop of rope around his nose and under his chin, but he refused to be led neatly like a dog along the cobbles. He also had to be pushed from behind, but as two women placed their open palms on his arse and leaned into the strain, the animal humped his back and recoiled, as if by retracting both front and back simultaneously, he could vanish up into himself and disappear.

And didn’t he wish himself gone just then.

Seven people followed him, and three were wearing aprons. One carried a bowl.

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I had a quick chat with him before the conservation event in Miavaig. We’d already spoken on the phone, and it was clear that we’d plenty in common. I hoped to catch him again before the end of the night, but once I had drawn my spiel to a conclusion and fielded questions about curlews and lapwings from an audience of thirty five attendees, folk began to quietly file away. I looked for him, but somebody said that he’d had to rush home.

The group was mainly made of crofters and farmers from the far western coast of Lewis - and it was heartening to find that so many of them were interested in wader conservation… but it’s also relevant that when I asked for a show of hands to tell me how many people were crofters, only two would say as much. It’s a heavy word, and it means a lot. Many of the old traditional crofters refuse to self-identify in those terms, and (conversely) many people who have just arrived on the island and now keep chickens or a polytunnel are almost too-keen to join the club. In asking who was a crofter, I had made exactly the kind of mis-step which marked me down as an outsider. Being fair to myself, somebody from Lewis would make similarly complicated mistakes in Galloway, and Scotland is too big and confusing for anybody to feel at home in all of it. Besides, I never tried to make myself out as one of the boys in that crowd – and it’s funny that trying to mark yourself as “one of the boys” in any part of Scotland only highlights that you aren’t.

As we stacked the chairs and binned the paper cups, I realised that I had lost my chance to finish the conversation I had begun at the start of the evening – but then another person said that “my new friend” had left instructions for me to go round and see him when I was done - if I was able. Armed with a name and a loose direction to his house above the edge of the bay, I set off to find him.

It’s one thing I miss in Galloway – that we’ve lost the knack of being in touch and stopping by. Nowadays I’m inclined to call or text before I just show up in the yard – but it never used to be like that. People would simply come around, and you’d stop what you were doing and put the kettle on. It’s been gone from here for so long that it sat badly with me to knock on a stranger’s door at nine fifteen in the evening for the simple sake of saying hello, but I consoled myself with the thought that he’d asked for it.

A dog barked. There was swearing in the house, and then my new friend had arrived with the baggy-toes of his woollen socks in folds at the points of his feet. He was pleased to see me, and I was pleased to see him.

I was taken into the best room and seated on a wooden chair by the window. He poured me a tall glass of beer and a tall glass of whisky and I drank from them both in settled alternation. He explained that the whisky was rough and needed to be smoothed out, and that once we had taken a drink or two, we could dispense with the beer. But we never reached that cruising altitude. We only climbed, and wasn’t that one of the finest evenings of the year I’ve spent so far, sitting knee-to-knee with a man I had only met in person a few hours before, talking in calm detail at first and then latterly spattering our conversation with exaggerations and expletives and points made deeply in earnest – points which suddenly seemed to matter more than anything else in the world, even though they’d been thought of less than ten minutes before.

I heard a little of his life and he heard a little of mine. He looks forward to seeing his grandchildren when they come back. I told him that I am bursting with pride and admiration for my own small son. Then we were back onto stories of curlews and salmon and calves we have loved and others we have saved from a slack start, only to later go back on themselves and fall dead.

It was light when I went inside that house, but when I looked behind and out of the window after an hour’s conversation, I saw the moon burst over hills towards the Island of Great Bernera, black as a kettle’s belly in a chase of silver water - and I was suddenly grateful for the way my new friend had let the time pass and the twilight come inside the house. There had been several moments when he might have stood up and turned on the light on the wall by the fire, and I was so glad that he hadn’t. Christ, but I would have recoiled from him in a blast of that overhead light because I guess that we’d embarrassed ourselves in talking like friends. We were strangers, after all – and yet we had covered ground I would never have believed in the hard light of day. No part of that night or my thinking could have survived a sudden reveal of electric light, like the work of a shit magician in the rain – kazam, and look at yourself, and what a fucking idiot you are after all.

Of all our little overlaps, he had seen the use of this light most clearly. I would have done the same, and turning back from the moon, I looked to my new friend in the dark house and saw him only as a silhouette against the wall behind him; a laughing silhouette with a sparkling glass of drink on each knee – and I could have shouted aloud with gratitude and deepening affection.

Two hours passed. He had begun to feel for his words in the gaelic – and he’d reached a tipping point beyond which I couldn’t follow him. When I asked him to reveal the meanings of certain words, he would offer a translation, then he would swear and withdraw it again, saying “no, it won’t just do that”. All the while, his dog lay farting on its mat by the stove and every stressed syllable of his master’s conversation provoked the animal to wag its tail, stirring a little more ash from the peat fire to rise and tingle in the moonlight.

In the end, we stood and we shook hands and we stepped out to piss on the verge of the road to his house. A corncrake was rasping in the nettles and the moon was high and fat as a spoonful of cream. But for all that I cherished his company and agreed that there was more to discuss; that we’d hardly lifted the lid on all the things we might have talked about, I have no immediate plans to go back that way, and no cause to return for work.

You might say of an enemy, well “for sure it’s a good thing that three hundred miles lie between his doorstep and mine”. But it can also be true of a friend - that you’re glad that he is where he is because it explains so much of who he is, even if it means you may never see him again.

There were so many curlews on Orkney that I began to think I was the victim of a practical joke. Driving from Kirkwall to Orphir, I saw vast herds of birds on the roadside, to the point at which I became an obstacle to traffic. But even when I tried to rationalise the spectacle of a hundred curlews on the roadside as the complete coming-together of birds from an entire parish, I would drive around a corner and find two hundred more. This is the time of year when curlews bring their broods of youngsters together into post-breeding flocks. I’ve read about it in books, but curlews were too far gone in Galloway for me to ever have seen them at this pitch of abundance – and in the full course of my seventeen years of curlew-focus, the handful of young birds I’ve seen by the Solway in August and September was utterly blown away by the abundance of curlews on Orkney.

I’ve already written at length about massive numbers of curlews I saw on South Ronaldsay in March. Many of these birds were passing through on their way to other places, and that was before the breeding season had begun. The effect is multiplied in August because every successful pair of breeding curlews which stayed on Orkney is now accompanied by their young of the year – juveniles which can be told apart from their parents by shorter beaks and clumsier attitudes. It’s fair to say that I have never seen these “endangered” birds at such a pitch of abundance.

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It’s nothing like a hardship to rear a single calf. I had been advised against it, but now that it’s become a day-to-day reality, I appreciate the new routine - and the squeak of a tongue working hungrily at the rubber teat is welcome news. This teat had to be positioned by hand at first. I had to show him how it worked, and the learning wasted much of the milk in the fuzz of his beard - but now the calf understands his work, he comes readily and he doesn’t miss a drop. And afterwards when he is full, it takes him time to wind his tongue back in. Numb with satisfaction, it hangs from his mouth like a chameleon’s wasted shot - and he doesn’t know why I’m laughing at him.

I can understand why people hate this work. If I had to do too much of it, I would soon sicken at the smell of powdered milk - and I know from having tried similar in the past that when things aren’t working out, trying to connect a slack nozzle with a slacker tongue is enough to make you burst with sadness and frustration. Under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t take a healthy calf away from its mother and rear it from a bottle. You’d be far more likely to use this trick on a calf which already had some kind of problem, and you’d be hoping against hope that you could keep it alive long enough to find a fix. Given that most people carry out this job beneath a cloud of anxiety and dread, it’s no surprise that bottle-feeding is unpopular.

And now in the mornings when the cold feels suddenly sharp, I look forward to waking up at five and listening to the pan of milk gathering steam on the stove. I like standing beside this calf and listening to the quail who calls from the barley, and the terrible scaffolding of cobwebs in the fallen grass, and the distant chatter of grouse on the hill. The calf is good company, even in the glassiness of his concentration and the strange opacity of his pleasure.

Because we have been so focussed on Spain and Spanish cattle this year, my son has chosen to call this little bull Saliente. I think he said the word before he’d given it much thought, because it has no real relevance here. It means “salient” - as in a bulge or a prominence. I wonder if he was thinking “valiente”, courageous - an adjective that is often applied to fighting bulls. Or was he thinking “caliente”, spicy - a similarly evocative word to highlight a bad temper? My son has been listening to me speaking Spanish to a host of farmers, cattlemen and country folk across Spain, and I think he was reaching for the mood of the language, if not the specifics. So now this little galloway bull who has never heard of Spain or “prominence” is called Saliente - and when he is kicking his heels and running in funny little loops around his pen, I’ve started calling him Sal.

I’ve been consumed by the folklore of Tras-os-Montes. I had never heard of masked performers or winter festivals until I spent a week in the mountains above Rabal, far out on the frontiers between Portugal and Spain. I went to see wolves, and to work further into a project around rural decline and depopulation. I didn’t expect my brain to be fried by folk-theatricals and firelit processions through heavy, cobbled streets - and now it’s become a subject I touch almost continually when I think of Iberia and the rain in the north which falls upon groves of gum rose and sweet chestnut trees.

The character I love the most in the folk-pantheon of northern Portugal is Chocalheiro, the topsy-turvy villain who dances between two personalities of friendliness and threat. There are many different iterations of Chocalheiro - he is both an archetypal mischief-maker and also a spirit of place, like a genius loci - and since many of these traditions are said to reach back to Iron Age Iberia, it’s not so untoward to use the latin freely here. He’s old in the way that stones are old, and the person who is nominated to perform as the red-and-black-faced Chocalheiro each year is carrying a tremendous weight on their shoulders.

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Looking back through some old projects, I rediscovered some recordings we made in the peat bogs of Finland during the spring of 2023. This was a fantastic stream of work, and it allowed me to spend time in the bogs and lakes along the Russian border near the frontier town of Ilomantsi, where the ancient folklore of forest people blurs into technicolour ecologies of freshwater fish, capercaillie and red wood ants.

Working with an ornithologist and a sound engineer, we compiled an anthology of birdsong from a vast area of bogland during the peak of the wader breeding season - and since the technical aspect of this work was undertaken by superbly talented professionals, I can proudly claim that this is the best piece of work I’ve ever been involved in… without conferring any real credit on myself.

The recording I commend to you here falls in two halves - the first is me in conversation with Dr. David Jarrett. It’s just chatty context, and it’s a bit of fun. The second half is Pete Smith’s soundscape - and I present it to you now as almost compulsory listening. Turn it up, close your eyes and conjure a mental image of that terrifying enormity of wilderness which runs from Finland to China in a jumble of birchwood, peat and birdsong. It’s an astonishing piece of work.

Curlews always sound beautiful, and it’s an obvious pleasure to hear them recorded in such crisp abundance - but believe it or not, the bubbling sound in the background of this entire recording is just the rolling display of innumerable black grouse which performed around the clock during May in eastern Finland. Elsewhere on this tape, there are familiar and wonderful species like golden plover, lapwings and greylag geese - but I get a particular chill at nine minutes and fifty six seconds when Pete picks up the distant blare of cranes displaying - and knowing that these birds used to be abundant in peatlands and wetlands across Scotland and Ireland (and were a core food species for our ancient ancestors), they drive home a sense that in this recording, we are also listening to a lost fragment of own natural history.

Notwithstanding a few ecological curveballs, this is what Galloway would have sounded during the Iron Age.

And if that doesn’t send a chill down your spine, you’re reading the wrong Substack!

This work was funded by the RIGG Trust… for which I am extremely grateful.

My rifle was broken, so I went to buy a new one. It turned out to be an expensive trip, but the experience of buying a firearm sparked a useful reminder of how one word can have so many meanings – because you can’t just buy “a gun” or “a rifle”. There are thousands of different kinds of guns or rifles, and the calibre or bore you select is further subdivided into manufacturers and ballistics and chokes and scopes and actions. There’s a blizzard of detail to consider… and most of it is staggeringly uninteresting.

To me.

Because while I have been shooting for thirty years and I’d hang my hat upon fieldsports as one of life’s great entry points to nature and culture and the root-and-branch nervecentre of the planet itself, I’m quite unusual in this respect. For a parallel (and probably much larger) audience, shooting is an opportunity to get technical – to focus in upon the finest and most delicate nuance of granularity.

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I lay out in the evening for a buck, and all the new-mown grass was heaped in mounds below me. It’s been some time since I took a deer from these fields, and because the weather has been coarse and dry with the yard at thatch beneath it, I liked the idea of frying fillets in a pan one evening.

But just as there are bucks to spare on nights when I have no time to gather them, this time I was disappointed. Dusk expanded, and the heavy smudge of summer twilight hung across the north horizon. I was so determined to get my deer that I hung on long beyond an easy chance to fire at fox cubs and crows which emerged to tumble in the fallen grass. In years gone by, I would have jumped at the chance to shoot a fox wherever I could find it – but now that so much has been lost, I query myself. Predator control works, but only where it’s delivered with consistency and dedication. You don’t do much good by shooting the odd fox in passing, and besides, I have nothing to protect these days. It’s not as if a cub killed cleanly in July would ever bring the March and April lapwings back, or even bring them nearer. It would be nothing, and besides, I wanted a buck for the fire and the sizzle of a greasy pan. A shot for a fox would drive the deer to hiding.

But then it was dark. Stars rode overhead, and on the side of the road as you drive north to Aberdeen, a pub bears the old slogan “ye may gang far and fare waur”. I’ve already been away for large parts of this summer, and I’m lucky that work has freed me up to follow my nose. I don’t often leave this place because I’ve been unable to stay here (although it has been known). There is no stick to drive me away, and the carrot is only that I’m drawn to explore and check my working against that of other places. But on a soft night with gulls dropping down to the sea and the glow worms and the fattening brambles in a sparkle of moths, I wonder that I ever have a will to travel further than I could walk in a day.

I watched the barn owl out around the grass, and I heard the warblers ring on the riverside. A quail had begun to beat his call from the lip of a barley field above the road, and another one answered him from half a mile upstream where a different crop of cereals had turned cream and grey in the moonlight.

There’s no real pattern to the strange, unstable movements of quail in Galloway. I only recently learnt that they came here at all, and I used to think that any report of quail calling was coming from domesticated birds which had broken out from their pens. But they are wild, and they really have come from somewhere south of the Sahara. In a normal year, a small handful of quail make it into Galloway - and in a good year, perhaps twenty or thirty birds will come. But twenty or thirty is still a tiny number when measured against the sheer scale of this place, and the local bird-reports drily inform us that they are always “uncommon”. Balance that against my own notes, which are always full of superlatives and excitement when quail appear.

If they make it to Galloway at all, quail don’t arrive until the middle of July – and that means they’re one of the last breeding birds to make it here, long after the heart of summer has passed. Lie in the cut grass and wait for a buck until midnight, and remember that when February comes, this will all seem like an impossible dream.

A little black heifer turned up in the grass, and another one came soon afterwards. I was always doomed to have a weird, protracted calving this year, neither in spring nor late summer. The truth is that I was caught between two stools and fell in the gap – and I wonder how much of farming takes place behind a screen of secrecy. When I am laughed at for doing stupid things, I reckon the most stupid thing about me is that I talk about it – and in fact, I am no more or less stupid than anybody else, I only lack the sense to shut up.

There’s no great problem with calving in July and August. It’s not normal, but the calves are fine and on a system like mine there are few commercial imperatives which drive me to wake up screaming in the night. In simple terms, it’s not ideal – but since the alternative would have been to have no calves at all, I think I’m doing here what I’ve been doing all along – making the best of a less-than-perfect situation. And maybe that’s the heart of farming after all.

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Summer’s dead, and now for the doldrums before the bracken turns and the rowan berries flicker into life like the lights on a Christmas tree. As I write this at 5am, I can hear curlews out in the thatchy grass. They’re tall, returning failures coalescing in the same old fields where they come to lick their wounds each year in July. That’s how these birds decline - they fail to reproduce, and while none came to nest here this year, this junction of drains and ditches often serves as a rallying point for curlews who tried and failed elsewhere. I don’t know their stories, and they don’t say much. Watching through binoculars, it’s obvious that there are no youngsters among them, again. They have nothing to reward their summer’s work but the tumbledown rush of another autumn and a slow, weeping lope across to Strangford Lough and the Shannon.

Beyond these birds, juvenile peregrines turn above the blasted leaves, screaming. July is a month for peregrines. Young birds are hunting further afield, and you’ll find them up wherever you go here. There’s a workshop in Dumfries which plays a recorded sound of screaming peregrines to keep the pigeons away. It’s reckoned to be a fair deterrent, but it’s hard to see what pigeons can do when the sound is almost universal. I find it difficult to walk for more than hour without hearing a falcon in July, so while I’m sure that pigeons quake with terror at these calls, there is really no getting away from them. It’s only extra stress in a world that is already chaotic with fear.

I hear the falcons calling from the yard, but when I go to see if I can spot them turning above the river, swallows rise in a gale against the darkened cloud. Several broods were lined up in rows along the trailer and the baler, and they fly only when they have to. These youngsters have fledged these last few days, and I’m lost when I try to count them. There are no fewer than seventy in the air at once, and I know there are still more nests to come. One bird comes to mob me as I stand in my doorway, diving almost into my hair. This aggressive behaviour is not unusual, but there’s a heightened level of persistence here. I remember it from last year, and I wonder if the same bird holds a specific grudge against me, nurtured and maintained for all those long months when six thousand miles lay between us.

Even as I stand and watch these broods, shoals of larks and linnets and finches pass over the house and out to the headshot grass. I might be looking at two or three hundred birds in the space of a single glance, and when raucous, skirly greylag geese come pounding over the house to feed on the fallen barley near the town, they only serve to confirm that summer’s dead - and when my friends reply that I call this date too soon each year, it’s clear that nobody likes to hear bad news. But as blades are sharpened to cut the crops and the year’s bloom of starling chicks is picked apart by predators, it’s only death I see; and you should feel free to shoot the messenger if it helps.

I bought a new bull in the winter, and I spent weeks admiring him in the rain. Now he’s been mine for eight months, I start to get a clearer impression of what he’s all about - and I have to say that the novelty hasn’t worn off. I just can’t get used to him, and that’s hardly a complaint because he never does anything wrong - but the ways in which he differs from my galloways are written right through him in every hair on his body. He’s such a monumentally unusual animal that I’m never finished being surprised by him.

I noticed the superficial details first; his height and the length of his feminine legs. I liked the blur of his eyes, and I even admired the stubs of his horns which had been removed but have grown anyway in a kind of curling toenail in the bun of his hair (what would be called his “chignon” in French). But the real difference lies in his character and personality, which he wears with even greater prominence than his hide.

He’s soft as mud and he never makes me feel uneasy - but it’s a softness which seems to have its root in a lack of imagination. It simply hasn’t occurred to him to be mischievous or aggressive - and I guess that if he did think of acting out, he might not be able to sustain the thought for long enough to translate concept into delivery… which is a gentle way of saying that I don’t think he’s very smart. Maybe it’s just this guy, but since he is all I know of whitebred shorthorns, I have to wonder if it’s a characteristic of the breed. And being kind, I’m also conscious that galloways are famously intelligent and far-sighted. Maybe I’ve grown used to thoughtful cows, and here’s a normal one at last.

I’d also say that he’s hungrier than any other beast I’ve kept before. He feels the cold nights more and he is ravenous to fill his belly when the morning comes. That’s not unexpected either - galloways are hardy, and while whitebred shorthorns are also tough, they’re inevitably going to feel the pinch sooner. He’s less willing to peck at rough grass than the galloways, and I note that when all the cows are offered grass “ad-lib”, he is slower to profit from it. For a long time in this hard, cold spring, he languished in a state of slenderness while the galloways foraged for themselves and grew fat. But even now there is grass to spare, he’s still looking empty and lean.

My neighbours say this is what you get with a dairy beast, and I understand what they mean there. Whitebred shorthorns aren’t dairy cattle in the modern sense, but they were used for milking in the past - and when you think of dairy cows, there’s a tendency to imagine tall, bony statues with jutting pelvises and lumpy spines. Fat and bulging muscles are for beef animals - and the purpose of crossing whitebred shorthorns onto galloways is to produce a bigger, framier cow with more milk. Since galloways are short and dumpy, scale and framiness have to come from somewhere, and all I’m noticing are obvious, rational differences between breeds.

I’m delighted with “Oswald” and I’m counting the days until his first calves arrive next month - but that doesn’t mean that he’s been easy to understand.

I’m a clumsy swimmer, but once beneath the green and creamy waves off the coast of Plouescat, I found myself skimming through shallow banks of sand and shreds of weed like a seal. Armed with snorkel and mask, I marvelled at schools of mouthing mullet which passed almost within arm’s reach; whelks waddled and barnacles gasped in the bottoms, and the world I found underwater was so rich and exciting that I forgot to feel uncomfortable there. I rolled slowly around heaps of shattered granite, discovering ranks of tiny blennies and gobies and forests of belching anemones which recoiled from my touch. I have never given much thought to snorkelling and diving, but even the briefest taste of this work consumed me with the urge to explore further.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that I should have been so immediately won over by desire to dive. It’s a window on an entirely new world of nature, and as a lover of all fish and seafood, I should’ve been consumed by this decades ago - but in my mind’s eye, snorkels and diving gear belong to a world of “watersports and outdoor pursuits” which send a cold chill down my spine.

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Even at the height of midsummer, I can’t help but chime around cold memories of the monastery at Panagia Vidiani. That was February, when snow hung in the mountains and the smell of incense rose like steam from the door in the dusk. Crete was where I discovered tama in the world of Greek Orthodoxy; the idea of votive offerings fastened like baubles to an altar. I’ve already written plenty on the subject, and part of that plenty is here – but tamata rose again into the foreground as part of a display at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, deep in the salty folds of Cornwall.

In truth, this is the last place I had expected to learn more about Greek Orthodoxy, but in a section dealing with votive offerings in the museum, there was an “arm tama” and a “leg tama” made from small tokens of beaten metal, exactly as I’d seen them on Crete. Beside them, wax tamata of breasts, hands and babies had come from a parallel tradition in Portugal – and yet more represented people, kidneys, legs and feet made of paper and painted with silver paint in Crediton in Devon – a folk survival, or a tiny bubble of Orthodoxy somehow preserved for a time in the West Country? Part of this museum’s “magic” is the way in which it finds patterns in superstition and folk culture. There’s a fair tradition of witchcraft in Cornwall, but it would be a museum of local interest only if it wasn’t able to draw lines to Sufi Islam, Mexican syncretism and Ndebele traditions.

A sign above those Orthodox tama explained that votive offerings are quite common in many cultures, but there is also an explicit link to the Bible, in which sympathetic magic is discussed in the Old Testament, 1 Samuel 6 – “Make models of the tumors and of the rats that are destroying the country, and give glory to Israel’s God”. That’s not just a passive acknowledgement of an ancient habits - it’s an active endorsement and recognition that votive offerings have value, and noticing that religion is often a compromise between the overlapping needs of individuals and institutions, it’s worth wondering whether the Orthodox church adopted something that people were already doing, or whether it steered people towards votive offerings as a vent or an outlet for specific needs.

The Museum at Boscastle has improved dramatically since I first saw it almost twenty years ago, but alongside a wealth of interesting folk culture and superstition, it can hardly avoid playing to a more passive general audience who just like a creepy aesthetic of pentagrams and rubber-nosed witches. That’s me being a snob, but there are some great stories which lie beneath the surface here, and they’re easily missed beneath the “spooky” green lights.

This collection was assembled by Cecil Williamson, an enigmatic polymath who worked with MI6 to counter Nazi witchcraft during the war. In later life, he tried to reassemble aspects of pagan religions and became a “warlock” during the 1970s at a peak of interest in weird and paranormal activity. Some of the museum focuses on Williamson’s life and work as a serious ethnologist and collector, but his actual neopagan practice just feels a bit silly and camp - like Vincent Price wrapped in a bedsheet. I need to be careful here, because having nailed my colours to the mast of Ted Hughes, I have to concede that Hughes was also wrapped up in similar veins of the occult at this time. He didn’t dress himself up in funny outfits or murder chickens, but it’s probably not fair to snigger at Williamson’s rituals while taking Hughes’s dabbling seriously.

A dispassionate inventory of exhibits at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic at Boscastle would actually make for pretty dull reading. It’s just a bunch of rocks and models and feathers and shells - but beneath a dried-out badger’s paw, a little sign explains that badger’s paws have been used in healing rituals in certain Roma traditions. It’s that little piece of context which turns a desiccated limb into something special.. and it also alerts us to the fact that this specific paw has no more or less inherent power than any other badger’s paw. It’s been empowered by ritual - and the same is true of all these rocks and models and feathers and shells. It turns out that the objects themselves are of distant secondary importance. What matters is the ritual.

Certain strands of mainstream religion encourage us to focus on specific relics as a source of supernatural power. These objects are verified, authenticated and canonised, and it helps that as time passes, they often get old and tatty. We’re much more inclined to venerate things which have been venerated for a long time, and in general terms, we like our religion old. This continuity is jarred by the aesthetics of witchcraft and superstition which place far greater emphasis on ritual function - with no particular concern for certified authenticity. A pilgrim who brags that he has been to see a very ancient relic would be baffled by a witch’s response that they have also seen “a newer one of those” in a different location. All this becomes a long way around to suggest that while religions can coalesce around certain unchanging centres, superstitions are engaged in a far more participatory process of renewal and synthesis.

This participatory strand runs through Williamson’s collection, and it explains why he wasn’t content with the dry, academic ethnography of witchcraft. He wanted to inhabit those stories and superstitions, exactly as they were meant to be inhabited. Photographs of the ceremonies he devised look silly and inauthentic because they’re all so new and home-made - like a child playing with dressing-up clothes… but if the real value lies beyond how you look or what you use, the aesthetics couldn’t matter less.

I have often tried to understand some of these ideas around magic and superstition by reading about them – and the experience has been pretty interesting. The problem is that, when detached from context and reality, this subject soon blurs into a mess. I’m forever disappointed by own pragmatism - I wish I could suspend my disbelief more easily, but maybe the approach I have chosen is the wrong one. I’m looking at the objects when I should be looking at how they work and why - and I have to confess that for me, the most striking things in the museum at Boscastle were those Orthodox tamata – because I didn’t learn about them in books. I saw them being used for real in a cold, incense-laden monastery in the mountains of Crete. Those little pieces of tin threw me back in time by six months, and here’s a far better way to explore this subject.

It’s quite possible to catch bass in the Solway – but the odds are against it. Nine tenths of fishing for bass is waiting for a coincidence of circumstances; the right winds, the correct tides, the best lunar phase and the most profitable accumulation of prey species - and it’s fair to say that this coincidence doesn’t come along too often in Galloway. It therefore doesn’t really matter if plenty of bass live in the Solway. If the conditions are almost never right to catch them, they might as well be on the moon.

I set myself the task of catching bass because these are famously ephemeral and elusive creatures. The sort of sea fishing I was shown as a child was always based on blunt, heavy-handed persistence – a sport which lacked any of the finesse I associate with casting delicate flies for trout in the hills. Sea fishing as I knew it was saved by the fact that the ocean is full of variety, and you never know what’s coming next – so the objective is more like a foray into natural history than any real attempt to pursue a sport.

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