a tide line above the valley: perfect for red kites. That cliff on the mountain’s south face: surely there must be peregrines there … The train now pulling away from the north coast. A last glimpse of Orkney shimmering behind us in her veil of rain. Her harriers grounded, hunched under the dripping sky, feathers beaded with rain. The mark I’d made in the heather beginning to fade. Time on the train to reproof my boots, because the place I’m heading for, the next stop on my journey south, hints in its name that I should really be donning waders, flippers, a bog snorkel …
‘Flow’, from the Norse flói, a marshy place. The Flow Country, or The Flows as it is usually known, is the name given to the area of West Caithness and East Sutherland covered by blanket bog (literally bog ‘blanketed’ by peat). It is one of the largest, most intact areas of peat bog in the world, extending to over 4,000 km². Flick the noun into a verb and you also have what the landscape wants to do. The Flows want to flow, to move. The land here is fluid, it quakes when you press yourself upon it. The Flows is the most sensitive, alert landscape I know. A human cannot move across it without marking – without hurting – the bog. The mire feels every footprint and stores your heavy spoor across its surface. But it is a wonder you can move across it at all. There are more solids found in milk than there are in the equivalent volume of peat. The bog is held in place only by a skin of vegetation (the acrotelm), predominantly sphagnum, which prevents the water-saturated lower layer of peat (the catotelm) from starting to flow. And, oh, how it wants to flow! Think of the bog as a great quivering mound of water held together like a jelly by its skin of vegetation and by the remarkably fibrous nature of the peat. Think of that great mound breathing like a sleeping whale. For that is what it does. The German word is Mooratmung (mire-breathing). It is the process by which the bog swells and contracts through wet and dry periods. The bog must breathe to stop itself from flowing away.
As it breathes the bog changes its appearance. Unlike a mineral soil where the shape of the land is determined by physical processes, the patterns and shapes of the bog are continually shifting; peat accumulates and erodes, the bog swells and recedes. Occasionally, after exceptionally heavy rain, the water in the bog swells to such a volume that the peat, despite its great strength, can no longer hold the mound together. So the bog bursts, hacking a great chunk of itself away. In Lancashire in the mid-sixteenth century the large raised bog of Chat Moss burst and spilt out over the surrounding countryside, taking lives and causing terrible damage, a great smear of black water blotting out the land. Huge chunks of peat which were carried down the river Glazebrook were later found washed up on the Isle of Man and as far as the Irish coast.
The train follows the river Thurso. Herons in their pterodactyl shadows. The river so black it could be a fracture in the earth’s crust, an opening into the depths of the planet. Passing Norse farmsteads, Houstry, Halkirk, Tormsdale. The Norse language here flowing down from Orkney and spreading up the course of the river. Flagstone dykes marking field boundaries. Sheep, bright as stars against the pine-dark grass, disturbed by the train, cantering away like brushed snow. Then the train is crossing an unmarked border, a linguistic watershed, the last Norse outpost before the Gaelic hinterland of the bog, a ruined farmstead with a Norse name, Tormsdale, peered down on by low hills, each one attended to by its Gaelic, Bad á Cheò, Beinn Chàiteag, Cnoc Bad na Caorach. The last stop, as far as the Norse settlers would go. Because if you didn’t stop here you would wander for days adrift on the bog before you sank, exhausted, into the marshy flói.
‘Bog bursts’, ‘quaking ground’, ‘sink holes’ … I am trying to pay heed to the dramatic vernacular of the bog, checking my boots are well proofed, my gaiters are a good fit. I must remember to check and recheck compass bearings against the map, must remember to tread carefully over this landscape. Because once, I nearly lost my brother in a peat bog.
Another family holiday, another peaty, midge-infested destination. This time, the Ardnamurchan peninsula, Scotland’s gangplank, the jump off to America. My brother was six or thereabouts and we had been to the village shop, where he had bought a toy car. More than a car, it was a six-wheeled, off-road thing. Orange plastic like a street lamp’s sodium glare, round white stickers for headlights, a purple siren on the roof. My brother took it everywhere. And lucky for all of us he had the car with him on a walk up the hill one afternoon, holding the toy out in front of him, chatting to it, running through some imagined commentary, when he dropped, as if down a hole, into what looked like nothing more than just a puddle. The bog had got him. And he was struggling, sinking into the mire. But his instinct was to protect the car, to stop it getting muddy. So he held it out in front of him and by holding his arms out like that he stopped himself sinking any further and we leant over and hauled him out, oozing with black peat, like some urchin fallen down a chimney.
The train glides across the flow. Fences beside the track to hold the drifting snow. Tundra accents: greylag, skua, greenshank, golden plover. Wild cat and otter’s braided tracks. Sphagnum’s crimson greens. Red deer, nomads in a great wet desert, stepping between the myriad lochans. Mark the deer, for they can blend into the backdrop of the flow as a hare in ermine folds itself against the snow.
Then the train is pulling into Forsinard, where the Norse language has flanked around the bog and found an opening to the south through the long, fertile reach of Strath Halladale. And halfway down the strath met and fused with Gaelic making something beautiful. Forsinard: ‘the waterfall on the height’. Fors from the Norse (waterfall); an from the Gaelic (of the); aird from the Gaelic (height). Clothes still dank with Orkney rain, smelling of rain, I stepped down off the train, crossed the single-track road, and walked out into the bog in search of merlins.
What else does he have in his knapsack, his machine? He has taken it off while he pauses to rest at Banchory, 23 miles out of Aberdeen. He leaves the road, sheds his coat and washes his hands and feet in the river Dee. He notices how people’s accent here has slipped away from Aberdeen, a softening in the tone, a slower pace to it, as if the dialect here still carries a memory of Gaelic. And sure enough, a little further up the road he passes two men on horseback talking in Gaelic. He speaks Gaelic himself, has considerable knowledge of Scots and its many dialects. All along his journey he passes through the ebb and flow of dialect. Every mile along the road accents are shaved a fraction. Often he struggles to make himself understood. He might follow a seam of Gaelic like a thin trail through the landscape until it peters out on the outskirts of a town.
What else is in his knapsack? Two black lead pencils; eight camel-hair pencils with stalks; an Indian rubber; a shirt; a false neck; two pairs of short stockings; a soap box; two razors; a sharpening stone; a lancet; a pair of scissors; some thread; needles. In a small pocket in the inner side of his flannel undervest there is nine pounds sterling in bank notes. One pound in silver is secured in a purse of chamois leather kept in a pocket of his trousers. In all, ten pounds to last him through to London.
That first day he walks as far as Aboyne, 30 miles from Aberdeen. That night, at the inn, he writes in his journal until the candle has burnt down. He writes a long list of all the plants he has seen that day, both those in and out of flower. He dreams again of the museum, the place obsesses his dreams. But this dreaming is inevitable because the museum is the reason he is making this walk to London. He has heard that the British Museum holds an astonishing collection of beasts and birds, of all the creatures that have been found upon the face of the earth. And he must go to London to see these things. There are gaps in his knowledge, in the survey of himself, he needs to fill. As a student at Aberdeen he studied medicine for nearly five years, then, in 1817, switched to zoology. Since then he has devoted himself completely to studying the natural world. Linnaeus and Pennant have been his guides but now he has reached the point where he needs to set what he has learnt of the natural world against the museum’s collection. He wants to check his own observations and theories against the museum’s. Above all, he wants to see the museum’s collection of British birds. Birds are what stir him more than anything. He is anxious to get there, to get on with his life.
The way I’d pictured it, back home
