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You can tell it’s a Scottish muir by its beautiful ginger hair.

End of the day, end of the bottle, end of the dram. Such was the physicality of the taste I felt I’d used a steak knife to slice and eat the tenderest of beef prepared by the Michelin star-ed Peat Inn, Fife; served in a room in the Western Isles hospital, Stornoway; beside an open window with the wind blowing straight in off the Minch.

My lovely family know that they can make my day by sending me peaty greetings. Mark, my brother, sent me this pic of my nephew, Euan, snapping away at some peat banks at Dunvegan on Skye this afternoon.

Under the green mesh a huge stack of peat pellets are drying before being bagged and sold for burning in domestic fires, Caithness.

Day turns to night across the Highland fault line, Ben Lomond across Flanders Moss.

At Doune library the novelist James Robertson read from his collection ‘365 Stories’ a tale of working at the nearby Blair Drummond Safari Park as a student. During the very long, hot, dry summer of 1976 a pit was dug so that an elephant with sore, cracking skin could have a mud bath.

Afterwards as night fell on Flanders Moss footsteps are firm where a month ago they squelched, tadpoles have disappeared from the frogspawn filled peat-puddles, the only creature a black ribbed slug- an antlered “monarch of the moor”- making his own moist trail, wetly silvering the boardwalk in the moonlight over the elephant skin cracks of the bog’s dry surface.

Fires are often caused by outsiders not used to the ways of the peatland. This character was spotted adding fuel to the flames on Islay.

Reassuring to find in these dry days of May that the Sherrifmuir, no stranger to conflagrations, comes equipped with its own fire extinguisher.