Galloway: Life In a Vanishing Landscape

Introduction

[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis—only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.

—Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

The greatest compliment that one can receive from my dad goes like this: he will be describing a person to me, and he will remark with some severity, he or she (here he levels his gaze at me) "is a worker." What this means is that Dad has witnessed this person working hard at a given task, often a thankless one, with determination and competence, or if not competence, then at least a clear pursuit of it. His worker is the opposite of a shirker. She or he is a person who never seeks a way around or out of the required work, but understands instead that the only proper path to getting a job done is through it. The worker can be seen rolling up their sleeves and employing his or her acumen, such as it is, to determine the optimal pace at which a given chore may be accomplished, and then proceeding to defeat the challenge at hand utilizing the appropriate quantity of hustle. My dad bestows this high estimation upon them to acknowledge the responsibility they display in their efforts. Engaging in good work is an act of affection—toward loved ones, toward the self, and even toward the landscape and her ingredients, as this conscientious work honors the materials at hand. Thus the sweat and sorrow of honest labor arrive hand in hand with health and joy, love and excellence.

My devotion to great agrarian writing led me to discover (on Twitter) and subsequently befriend another agrarian-minded farmer in England’s Lake District, fell shepherd James Rebanks. James, who is pursuing the ideals of sustainable agriculture while rewilding portions of his farmland, also happens to be a successful author of books in this genre. For reasons that I am still ferreting out, I happen to be besotted with the subject matter of traditional agriculture and any related application of human ingenuity that involves working with our wits and our muscles, and I guess most important, our hearts. In this age of all-powerful consumerism, climate crisis, and the continued pillaging of our planet’s resources, the stripe of ecologically sound labor lionized by these writers represents a true north star to fans of common sense. Thanks to them and their devotion to an agriculture that seeks to collaborate with Mother Nature instead of dominating her, we are reminded in what direction we should aim our hope. This work strives to identify and subsequently begin to heal the wounds we have inflicted over the last century upon our soil, air, and water, while yet producing healthy meat, dairy, grain, and produce. It’s an awfully tall order, and success will take us many, many years of radical work, but when it’s done right, this good work is an absolute comfort and joy to countenance. To that end, I have had the pleasure of visiting James and his family in the very northwest corner of England a handful of times over the last couple years.

Just north of the border, in the southwest of Scotland, there is a comely county (or unitary council area) called Galloway whose gently undulating terrain slopes south to the Solway Firth, a thirty-eight-mile inlet of the Irish Sea. From lunchtime on, the sun gleams off the water in the distance, lending a tragically beautiful mood to the setting, as though one is likely to run into Olivia Colman and David Tennant out on a chilly Broadchurch investigation. On February 5, 2019, James treated me to a bit of a tour of this region as part of my ongoing ad hoc education in the local Galloway cattle breeds. He suggested we stop near Dalbeattie and meet Patrick Laurie, another young writer having a go at an old, traditional family farm (or else another young, traditional farmer taking a swing at writing a book). The rugged and haunting landscape was punctuated by the modest hues of winter gorse and heather, lending a tweedy feel to the hills. We bypassed the occasional gargantuan, glacially deposited granite boulder until we came to the general area that had been specified by Patrick, but we blindly tooled right on past his address. His driveway, like his centuries-old buildings, blended seamlessly into the extremely bucolic setting. Luckily, Patrick had been tracking our progress across the landscape from his farm, and he quickly set us right via cell phone.

We pulled up to the farmstead and found it simultaneously bleak and charming, like an amazing place to shoot a seventies rock album cover but maybe not the most comfortable place to spend a blustery winter. The stone house and outbuildings were all situated around a central, squarish courtyard, with a couple of incredible-looking enormous pigs (an old-fashioned native breed called Oxford Sandy and Black) and the stiff body of a dead fox that Patrick had shot the day before our visit. I was absolutely transfixed as he showed us around the place, introducing us to those pigs, his trusty dog, and finally his pride and joy: a small herd of fifteen Riggit Galloway cows.

Riggits are an ancient breed of cattle, native to southwestern Scotland, that come in all sorts of woolly color combinations between black, dun, and red, either solid or mixed palatably with cream. They are prized for their ability to graze on rough forage and then transform those thistles into high-quality meat. Patrick seemed like he could even be related to his Riggits, as both exhibited a quiet, rugged charisma that revealed itself as they approached the fence that stood between us. Their coats were handsomely abstract—they looked not so much like calico as like someone had splashed a bucket of complementary color across their base coats: black splattered on white, white splotched onto red, and so forth. Much like Patrick, these stoic characters stood with confidence, exuding a certain dependability in their lack of complaint. I have also seen him methodically chew with apparent satisfaction.

Patrick is what I would call a sturdy and steadfast fellow, with a ruddy complexion of his own that flushes pleasurably at the drop of a hat. In the short time I’ve known him, I have seen his red cheeks signify cold weather, passionate emotion, hard work, and the pleasing warmth of beer and mirth in the basement of a Glasgow theater. From the first sighting of Patrick, it’s clear that he is no stranger to arduous labor, and the same can be said of his wife, Tina. She displays the stoic, smiling support of so many farm spouses I have had the pleasure of knowing, whether lugging buckets of grain out to the cattle or hauling a tray of brownie from the oven to feed us lads. Farm families have a refreshing honesty when one visits their location because the evidence of their labor is all around them. The care (or lack thereof) with which they keep their animals, their gardens, and their buildings is immediately apparent. In the midst of the ample evidence of clear organization in their dooryard, Patrick and Tina were quick to point out the couple of minor messes that were next on their itinerary. Their wellies (galoshes) and the canvas and wool flannel of their garments had been visibly hard used. Everything about them and their commercially modest but bucolically wealthy farmstead told the observer that, by god, they were rolling up their sleeves and giving it a go.

This particular Laurie farm is old, but Patrick said that nobody knows when it was first built. It showed up on a map from the 1580s, but since there were almost no maps of this area before that time, he posited it might have been there for centuries before that. I asked for how long this land had been in his family, and he said that there was no direct familial connection to this specific acreage, but if you were to climb up on the shed roof, you could see his parents’ house, the house where his grandparents had their honeymoon, the farm owned by Lauries between 1800 and 1890, and two places his great-uncle had rented in the 1930s. Patrick’s farm resides somewhat in the middle of all these historic spots, so it stands to reason that his ancestors’ pipe smoke had at least blown across his pastures in days of yore.

As we hiked over several acres of Patrick’s farm, a daunting list of chores presented itself whichever direction one glanced: maintaining the feed and comfort of cows, pigs, chickens; planting, growing, and harvesting crops of assorted grasses and grains for feed and silage; attending the upkeep of assorted fences, walls, gates, not to mention farm equipment; and those are just the headlines in addition to the countless sundry tasks to be found in house and barn. Patrick pointed out landmarks far and near, and said that this beautiful landscape is vanishing as it’s being inexorably drowned in commercial conifer forests. Then he slowed down and changed tack a bit. He upped his gravitas, shifting focus from the tangible, real-world needs of his farm to a matter that existed more in his hopes and dreams. With a small, slightly self-effacing smile, he spoke to us of the noble curlew—a beloved member of the sandpiper family that traditionally nests in the grasses of local fields. Patrick, James, and a great many of their fellow naturalists have expressed a loyal affection for this charming wader, whose child-rearing habits have been all but wiped out by tractor farming and predators (the reason behind the dead fox in Patrick’s courtyard). He explained that the plight of the curlew is emblematic of the greater issue facing small farmers not only in Scotland and England, but all over the world: the cornucopia of diverse species of flora and fauna found in nature, not to mention the health of the very elementals themselves—the air, the soil, and the water—have been utterly ravaged by the violence and pollution of industrial agriculture.

The examination of this conundrum is precisely what attracts me to Patrick’s voice. Step one, as always, is admitting that we have a problem, which he does with charming modesty, the problem being our reliance on modern technologies and the estrangement that such a sense of luxury can engender between us and the land that supports us. He then endeavors, with equal parts humor and pith, to paint an honest portrait of the humble undertaking to which he and Tina have committed themselves. His chapters apply a delightful honesty to the poignant struggles of everyday agriculture, but then occasionally take my breath with a lyrical passage about his commitment to carry forward some distillation of an old truth. The couple’s commitment to each other and their living, breathing home place requires an ever-deepening fidelity as their path is slowly and arduously revealed to them through trial and error. Patrick writes, It’ll take a lifetime to call this place my own. Based on the joy and grief chronicled herein, there will likely be plenty more yearning and frustration to counterbalance future triumphs and bountiful love. Presumably, if our luck holds, this will lead to more of this rapturous writing because (and here I level my gaze at you, reader, with gravity) Patrick Laurie is a worker.

Nick Offerman

BEGINNINGS

Winter Solstice – the Shortest Day

I peer through an open window in the darkness. The morning feels warm, and the fields click and chatter as they drain the night’s rain. Drips plop off gutters in the yard and a curlew calls. Our cockerel answers from the shed, and his din makes the tin roof ring.

Curlews vanished from the glen when the weather was cold, but they returned within hours of the thaw. Large winter flocks come inland from the sea and probe the sodden ground with long, curved beaks. I take the dogs out before breakfast and find the half-light filled with the sound of wading birds.

Our stretch of the river was straightened many years ago. Men dug a new and more efficient path for the water, but they failed to iron out the old bends. The river follows a straight and perfect line through the dark soil, but you can still see where the old stream used to play in swampy, tangled loops. Heavy rain can bring this waterway back to life – subtle contours flood again and become strings of narrow pools, pouchy old veins which bristle with reeds. The new river rushes water briskly out to sea. The old one hoards the rain and refuses to let go.

Curlews cluster in these haunted, sodden corners. The dogs flush them as the day brightens, and they wail in the falling rain. Drainage pipes were buried across these fields to bail water into the river, but after years of service they are beginning to fail. The terracotta tiles are breaking and the water has started to flow backwards. Without human intervention, the river will begin to resume its ancient course – the curlews pray for it.

The new bull calf bellows when he hears me open the back door after breakfast. His shed is across the yard, and he listens to every move we make. He was timid and small when he arrived here on the lorry from Kendal. He sorely missed his mother, but now he is growing in confidence and roars to be fed. Dull days and low cloud reduce him to a dark silhouette in a pool of straw. There are no electric lights in this shed, but we can make out that he has a fine head. It is heavy and square like a Belfast sink, and the curls grow so thickly upon it that they swallow my fingers to the knuckle. I rub his brow and stir up delicious scents of sweat and dry grass. His blue tongue rasps at my cuff and I turn to stare out through the open doorway. I am seeing the world from his perspective and realise that this rectangular hole is like a cinema screen to him. He lurks in the gloom and the days purr by in a flick-book of still images, alternating phases of blue, grey and darkness. He watches endless repeats of wild swans on the bottom fields. Owls star in his nights.

Everyone agrees that he’d be better outdoors. This animal was bred for wide open spaces, but I have no other options and there are some advantages to this early confinement. He might roll his eyes and moan but he can settle here without coming to harm, and he can get to know us. Buying him was a gamble, and now I’m relieved to feel it paying off. It is hard to tell how a calf will be as an adult, but this lad has promise.

A starling dies at noon. I watch the falcon peeling the corpse from the kitchen window as I fry an egg. The day is already over and the fields begin to recede beneath a veil of thin, chesty cloud. Later I will find most of the starling’s skull amongst a mess of feathers. It is a glossy ball which reminds me of a cape gooseberry; a discarded garnish.

Night falls with a rush of wildfowl. Ducks whoop in the deep blue, and the shapes of birds flare over the yard as I chop firewood. Then there is swirling rain which dances like smoke in the light of the kitchen window and lacquers the granite setts of the yard. It is only four thirty and a vixen is screaming for attention on the moss. The dogs cough to respond for a moment, then they jostle past my knees and back to the hot stove.

From this distance, summer feels like another place. I can hardly remember the sun, but now the darkening has slipped into reverse. Months of gradual compression will begin to relax, and daylight will leak back into our lives. It will be weeks before human beings can register the lengthening days, but the shift has been clocked by others. This wet, draining place is on the move at last.

*

Galloway is unheard of. This south-western corner of Scotland has been overlooked for so long that we have fallen off the map. People don’t know what to make of us anymore and shrug when we try and explain. When my school rugby team travelled to Perthshire for a match, our opponents thumped us for being English. When we went for a game in England, we were thumped again for being Scottish. That was child’s play, but now I realise that even grown-ups struggle to place us.

There was a time when Galloway was a powerful and independent kingdom. We had our own Gaelic language, and strangers trod carefully around this place. The Romans got a battering when they came here, and the Viking lord Magnus Barefoot had nightmares about us. In the days when longboats stirred the shallow broth of the Irish Sea, we were the centre of a busy world. We took a slice of trade from the Irish and sold it on to the English and the Manxmen who loom over the sea on a clear day. We spurned the mainstream and we only lost our independence when Scotland invaded us in the year 1236. Then came the new Lords of Galloway and the wild times of Archibald the Grim, and he could fill a whole book himself.

The frontier of Galloway was always open for discussion. Some of the old kings ruled everything from Glasgow to the Solway Firth, but Galloway finally settled back on a rough and tumbling core, the broken country which lies between tall mountains and the open sea. This was not an easy place to live in, but we clung to it like moss and we excelled on rocks and salt water both. We threw up standing stones to celebrate our paganism, then laid the groundwork for Christianity in Scotland. History made us famous for noble knights and black-hearted cannibals. You might not know what Galloway stands for, but it’s plain as day to us.

We never became a county in the way that other places did. Galloway fell into two halves: Wigtownshire in the west and the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright in the east. There are some fine legal distinctions between a ‘Shire’ and a ‘Stewartry’, but that hardly matters anymore because both of them were deleted in 1975 when the local government was overhauled. The remnants of Galloway were yoked to Dumfries, and the result is a mess because Dumfries and Galloway are two very different things.

Dumfriesshire folk mistake their glens for dales and fail to keep Carlisle at arm’s length. They’re jealous of our wilderness and beauty, but we forgive them because it’s unfair to gloat. Besides, they have the bones of Robert Burns to console them, and don’t we all know it. Perhaps Dumfriesshire is a decent enough place, but we’ve pulled in different directions for too long to make an easy team. Imagine a county called ‘Perth and Fife’ or ‘Carlisle and Northumberland’. Both would be smaller and more coherent than ‘Dumfries and Galloway’. Now there are trendy councillors who abbreviate this clunky mouthful to ‘D ’n’ G’, as if three small letters were enough to describe the 120 miles of detail and diversity which lie between Langholm and Portpatrick. Tourism operators say we are ‘Scotland’s best-kept secret’, and tourists support that claim by ignoring us.

It’s easy to see why visitors rarely come. They think we’re just an obstacle between England and the Highlands. They can’t imagine that there’s much to see in the far south-west and tell us that ‘Scotland begins at Perth’. Maybe it’s because we don’t wear much tartan, or maybe it’s because we laugh at the memory of Jacobites and Bonnie Prince Charlie. Left to our own devices, we prefer the accordion to the pipes and we’d sooner race a gird than toss a caber. If you really want to see ‘Scotland’, you’ll find it further north.

When Galloway folk speak of home, we don’t talk of heather in bloom or the mist upon sea lochs and mountains. Our place is broad and blue and it smells of rain. Perhaps we can’t match the extravagant pibroch scenery of the north, but we’re anchored to this place by a sure and lasting bond. There are no wobbling lips or tears of pride around these parts; we’ll leave that sort of carry-on to the Highlanders. We’ll nod and make light of it, but we know that life away from Galloway is unthinkable.

My ancestors have been in this place for generations. I imagine them in a string of dour, solid Lowlanders which snakes out of sight into the low clouds. These were farming folk with southern names like Laidlaw and Mundell, Reid and Gilroy, and they worked the soil in quiet, hidden corners without celebrity or fame. Lauries don’t have an ancestral castle to concentrate any feeling of heredity. We’ve worked in