First frost.

Autumn on the peat moor: a half world.

Bog cotton.

Peat pattern.

Midnight sun at the shieling.

“…She’s up all night till the sun,
I‘m up all night to get some,
She’s up all night for some fun,
I’m up all night to get lucky…
We’re up all night for some fun,
We’re up all night to get lucky…”

From ’Get Lucky,’ Daft Punk featuring Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers 

From Allan Ramsay’s ‘Gentle Shepherd’ illustrated by David Allan.

National Galleries of Scotland

 

 

Living out on the high moor at Craigenputtock Farm, Dumfries in 1828 was Jane Welsh with her new husband Thomas Carlyle.
“I had gone with my husband to live on a little estate of peat bog that had descended to me all the way down from John Welsh the Covenanter, who married a daughter of John Knox. It was sixteen miles distant on every side from all the conveniences of life, shops, even post-office. Further, we were very poor, and further and worse, being an only child, and brought up to great prospects, I was sublimely ignorant of every branch of useful knowledge, though a capital Latin scholar and very fair mathematician. It behoved me in these astonishing circumstances to learn to cook! no capable servant choosing to live at such an out-of-the-way place, and my husband having bad digestion, which complicated my difficulties dreadfully. So I sent for Cobbett’s ‘Cottage Economy,’ and fell to work at a loaf of bread…”

image:http://www.craigenputtock.org.uk/single.php?id=18

The bog strikes back. The more the trees drink the water from the moss the bigger they grow but the less secure their roots are able to anchor in the peat. In conjunction with the “muckle forester”- the wind- the trees can be felled. This one on Bankhead Moss has tipped 45’ in the last four months.

 

Wishing well. Conservationists hope that artificial dams will stop the peat moss drying out. The birch trees that fringe the bog cast autumnal copper coin leaves that glint to deceive whilst their roots and progeny secretly gulp up the valuable water.

Peat creel.

The road to the moss is lined with… copper.