Dalreagle

My truck sizzles through muddied puddles on a narrow road carved out between two round wallowing hills in Wigtownshire. Roof drumming rain still falls. It smacks and tumbles in colourless tears down my windscreen and I sigh. I pull up at Culmalzie T junction. My indicator blink blinks left, but my heart tugs wanting me to turn right. If I were to follow my heart I’d be going to the farm where us five kids grew up with Mum and Dad. Dalreagle.

Three hundred and forty acres of low-lying land, guilty of flooding and sleeping on the West Bank of the river Bladnoch. Dalreagle was, and still is, a good grassing farm. Enough hay was made in the summer to see the stock through the leaner months and the deep earth was fertile enough to grow swathes of barley and oats. The cattle were shiny and red and matched the soil. The sheep were big, horned and angry and bounced through the gateways, fuelled by the abundant rich grass.

The waters of Malzie flow down from Loch Hempton, a loch nestled into the boggy earth at Mochrum where I work and winds its way down to the south side of the farm. Trickling between the banks of the Malzie burn, it eventually spills into the river Bladnoch. It used to be the march, or boundary, between us and next door before a chunk of the land was sold off and Dalreagle shrunk in the wash. Those waters, the Malzie burn and river Bladnoch, wrapped round all our growing up, shaping each one of us just as it shaped the red earthed land that surrounded us. Its course is mapped within me as neatly as the veins upon my arms.

Bulging from its belt, the Malzie burn roars like a lion in the wintertime, but when stroked by summers slimming air she purrs like a kitten and chatters freely to common fisher folks and kingfisher birds whiling away the hours perched by her grey gravel bed, we’d picnic here together as a family and despite being only four fields away from our kitchen table, we felt as though we were miles away, and in some ways we were. We giggled on the slippery green pebbles that lay along the water’s edge, as delicate discs of mayflower drifted like confetti wrapping us in the sweet scents of spring slipping into summer.

We lived there. We loved there.

We were and still are a close knit family, albeit now one member short. Mum still lives at Dalreagle on her own, in a cot house - now converted and painted white, built at the top of the road that leads down to the farm steading and the workings of the farm. I’ve made the unfortunate habit of not visiting enough. Substituting family visits for work, I’ve been particularly bad since Dad died. I can’t say it’s because of his death I don’t visit so much, but I can say seeing his red, high sided chair sitting empty stings terribly.

Dad died of cancer in April 2020, just when Covid was beginning to bite. The world had been shut down and we were shut out at the same time as Dad entered his dying days.All non-essential travel was banned and my brothers, sister and I were forbidden to see Dad or help Mum with his care.

I remember my last visit, standing in a brisk wind outside their house on the lawn peering through the window, as if it was a telly. But inside, it was nothing like I’d seen in a film. There were no profound final words of goodbye. The closest I got to that was watching his frail hand wave through the living room window. Distant and obscured by the sunlight reflecting off the glass, I saw his grey palm floating with bony fingers stretched apart, like a hand from a drowning man grasping to be seen and saved. My final words were simply,

“Don’t get up Dad”.

And he didn’t. He died two weeks later at home on the sixth of April. Not one but two rainbows arched across the sky in technicolour glory at exactly the same time as my father John Ryman drew is last breath. There was no shock of death.

Dad was proud of my work at Mochrum. He never said so much but the signs, subtle and fleeting were there. The glint in his happy eyes, the approving nods, they were like footprints set in snow.

I learned everything I know now by shadowing Dad. It was just as he learned the ropes from his own father, my Grampa. When I was five I was asked,

“What are you going to be when you’re big?”

my answer came as easily as my breath.

“Shepherdess”.

I’d reply with my head held high.

My career choice was met with coos and ahhs by adults whilst I was in my pre-teens. I think they thought my answer to be cute, picturing caricature golden locks of hair and cuddly white lambs, but even at a tender age of five, I knew the job to be anything but fluffy and light.

Once I’d reached the age of thirteen, and I was in that awkward no man’s land of being neither a child or a proper teenager with attitude yet no sense of ‘cool’, my suggestion of working with sheep and on the land was met with scoffs and eyerolls. The chocolate box portrayal became tarnished with each subsequent birthday, but I was never put off.

The traditional narrative of a ‘herd’s life was shaped by wiry men with oversized muscly hands. Men who had faces built from creased leather, parched by the sun and wind. A job for boys who would grow into men, allegedly never aspiring to much. It was work out of kilter with this modern, highly educated age. These people who had dirt beneath their nails were cogs that jarred with this clean and smart digital age. I had seen the blood, sweat and tears on my own father’s face often enough to know it was no picnic, but I also knew that these people who worked and understood the land were the heroes I aspired to. The salt of my earth.

This year sees my twenty eighth year lambing sheep in my own capacity. I have three brothers and a sister, and whilst they all took an active role on the farm whilst young, they have fledged to jobs in towns and cities, leaving myself working the agricultural field. And as I have no children, I might well be the last with the Ryman name to work on the land.

I must confess the shoe of the job has tarnished a little. I still have an immense pride in my job, but it’s just getting that bit harder. The fields seem a little bigger, the sheep faster and I find myself questioning the why and wherefores of it more often. Lambed outside and in all weathers, it’s a slow old fashioned system that has remained relatively unchanged since my Grampa’s time working with hill blackies, the same breed as I work with. In an industry that’s forever getting quicker, it’s perhaps a piece in the agricultural jigsaw that struggles to fit in. I fear the same could be said about me.

Whilst he was proud of me, Dad had reservations about me working at Mochrum. He was never a fan of Galloway cattle. He too had had years of working with them and had been kicked and chased more often than he’d have liked to remember. Though it would be Belted Galloways I’d be working with, he reminded me that despite wearing a white belt that looped from their belly to their back, the beltie was still a Galloway. He thought of Galloway cattle as unpredictable in nature and afraid of them lashing out. He was afraid I would get hurt.

Those who work on the land rarely retire, instead the work changes. The ploughman might become a molecatcher. The shepherd might fix gated and fences or become a gardener, anything to hold them to the soil in which they know and love. They rarely own the land on which they toil as they are never paid enough money. Their name isn’t inked on velum yet are as rooted to the earth as the great oaks and ash that gave them shelter and shade as they grafted hard underneath. Unroot them and they may wither. I will wither.

……….

My indicator still blinks orange and left. I squeeze the accelerator, steer left and drive to The May. Work.

Five miles left and west is where slabs of greywhacke juts through the spongey black peat and where a tundra of rushes and militia, bog myrtle and heather thrives. Sugars withdrawn from the blades by winter have cast the hill ground pale. In summer it’s a riot of colour but now it lies hushed. The colour of deerskin and brindle, it helps tawny brown hares hide from flaming hungry foxes.. This is the May and Drumwalt moor and I think the place is magic.

The May, Drumwalt, Craiglarie, Challochglass and Craigeach, the hill farms that make Mochrum, neighbour each other in this moorland wilderness. They remain among the less improved and modernised farms in the country with names straddling time, clinging to a foothold in their Gaelic past. Craigeavh, spoken as Craig-Yach, mean rich of the horses and Craiglarie, rock of the mare. These horses, Galloway ponies, were likely to have been the ‘most ancient breed of Galloway horses’ as referred to in the First Statistical Account.

Standing at about fourteen hands high, these dark, stout ponies excelled at crossing Galloway’s difficult terrain, and weather the foulest of days. Held in the highest regards across the country never mind county, Shakespeare gave mention to them in Henry IV part 2, “thrust him downstairs! Know we not Galloway nags”.

These ponies worked hard. They carted, heaved and ploughed through rugged acres, helping carve out a rural community. They meant a lot to us, and we showed our appreciation by naming way marks after them. Then rewarded them by cross breeding them with heavier horses “better adapted to the draught”. And with a further pat on a back, for a job well done, we made them extinct in and around the middle of the nineteenth century.

Running westwards from Culmalzie T-junction to the May, the hard grey road winds past a lonely school called Culshabbbin and a tumbling cot house called Stanhope’s. The rumbling of my truck unsettles some pigeons, and they plume up and out from a cold chimney that crumbles on top of the cottage. Feathers, small and white, fall like ash in their wake.

Cot houses, now known more commonly as cottages, were once lived in by the ploughman or shepherd, in exchange for work they carried out on the land. These days the tenancy has since been taken up by a brood of barn owls. Building such as these, pepper the landscape of Wigtownshire in varying degrees of decay. The Galloway breed of pony was little different to the Galloway people who lived in Stanhopes. Both removed from the land, the compulsive modernity of agriculture holds no nostalgia to the old.