Galloway Page 3
My mother would take me to see my grandfather’s cattle as they lay on beds of fresh straw in the show lines. His farm name was painted on a board which hung above the cows, and the thick-wristed stockmen would wink at me and grin through a haze of cigarette smoke because I was the Group Captain’s grandson. We no longer had cattle at home, but here was a crucial thread of contact with heavy beasts. I don’t remember the animals so well as the paraphernalia which surrounded them – brushes, combs, nets of hay and coils of rope. Results from the judging were recited deadpan across a crackling tannoy: beasts from Rusko and Glaisters, from Barlay and Barcloy, from Plascow and Congeith. I was a small child, and these farm names plotted a complete map of the known universe. Here were my uncles and cousins, friends and family from far-flung places across the Southern Uplands, each with their own Galloway cattle as if no other breed existed. Even at this primal stage and divorced from animals of our own, my life was in orbit around beef.
Galloway has given its name to a breed of cattle, but so has Hereford, Devon and Sussex. There was a time when almost every county or region in Britain had its own breed. Dramatic changes during the twentieth century put paid to many of those old animals, and several weren’t deemed profitable in a modern farmyard. Agriculture was intensifying and animal breeding began to specialise on growth, scale and speed. We said goodbye to Sheeted Somerset cattle, the Suffolk Dun and the Caithness cow, as well as more than twenty other breeds of British livestock between 1900 and 1973. Galloways almost collapsed, and the old animals were replaced by fast-growing bulls from France and Belgium; heavy-lifters with strange and unpronounceable names. Most of the surviving native breeds were reduced to obscurity, just hobby projects for quirky smallholders and stubborn old folk.
But every native breed excels at something special. Tamworth pigs make superb bacon; Gloucester cattle produce milk which cheesemakers adore. Native breeds represent a wide variety of traits, characteristics and flavours which took centuries to refine. High-octane European breeds might have maximised productivity, but this has come at a cost to variety. Our food has been subverted by monotony.
Galloway cows have a particular knack for digesting rough grass. They’re born hungry, and they’ll fatten on feed which many other breeds would refuse to sleep on. A summer heifer fills herself with roughage until she’s as thick and fat as a grand piano, and the grass goes to build sweet, fine-grained beef. The muscle is laid down slowly, and the flavour is matched with a fine, melting texture. The sixteenth-century scholar Hector Boece praised Galloway beef as ‘right delicius and tender’, and modern chefs are titillated by T-bones and rib-eyes which are sold in the best and most exclusive restaurants across Britain. Like many native livestock breeds, Galloway cattle still exist because some people are prepared to pay more for food which ‘tastes like it used to’.
The Galloway’s reputation for superb beef is countered by rumours of violence and awkwardness. In the old days, cattle were cast into the hills and recovered to be killed after four years. These semi-feral beasts grew up to be cunning and insincere. It’s not so long ago that a friend of my grandfather’s was sorely mauled on the back hill, crushed to bits by a cow protecting its calf. I was too young to remember the details, but folk said he should have known better. I imagine him lying in the long grass with his ribs stoved in like a smashed accordion and grand clouds rolling by without a shrug. Arms and legs were broken as a matter of course, and cattle were ‘man’s work’, a gritty, fearsome struggle beneath low, grey skies. It was the perfect job if you’d been scorched by burning aviation fuel and had the strength of five men. Gathering pens were sealed with granite posts and reinforced with railway sleepers – if you came across old pens without explanation you could assume they were built to contain dinosaurs.
It’s easier for everyone when cattle are kept tame and close at hand. There’s nothing inherently wild or dangerous about Galloways, and the beasts are mainly gentle in their way. They’re slaves to their greed, and those heavy, snub-nosed heads can be bound in halters with a little coaxing. Any cow can kill you, and it seems unfair that Galloways should have a bad name.
My work with conservation and curlews had led me back in the direction of farming, but the tipping point came when I walked with my wife around the agricultural show at Castle Douglas and saw the old show lines again. My grandfather had been dead for twenty years and his herd was long dispersed, but here was a line of black cattle standing shoulder to shoulder beneath a rough, burning sun as if they’d not moved an inch in all that time. Perhaps there were not as many of them as there had been, but the animals were utterly permanent. The tannoy returned and I looked up from the bustling show to see fifteen miles of blue hill country towards Carsphairn and Dalry as if it had just sat up in bed. The bold, steady cows had rolled down from that land as surely as rain after a wet night; the purest distillation of place was conveyed in flowing black hair and foamy lips. My knees almost buckled beneath me. Here at last was a true point of entry to my own place. I turned to my wife and whispered, ‘We’re going to have cattle.’ To her eternal credit, she nodded.
Many young people find it hard to get started in farming. The industry looks like a closed shop to outsiders, but my family gave me a foothold as I began to focus on agriculture again. Rather than forge a new road from scratch, I just had to clear some brambles and cobwebs from an existing path. I asked our tenant for advice on getting started and he suggested that I take two of our fields back in hand, the rougher, less productive areas where I could find space for a few calves. The way was strangely clear, and the memory of those black animals at the show fell to a constant, nagging pulse in the back of my brain.
I took a step towards farming and found an old, familiar friend. I could slip in beneath heavy, hairy skins and find a whole new world. After thirty years in Galloway, I was finally heading home.
GRANITE
January
Low cloud and heavy rain.
Wild geese pass over the house in the morning and land in the fields by the river. The water grows fat and sluggish, then it spills its guts onto the grass. The world is reduced to a series of blue silhouettes, and still more rain lashes against the skylight and makes the glass crackle like newspaper.
No good will come of this day, but the cows need hay and the work cannot be postponed. Light, flossy bales come down from the hayshed rafters where mice cheep and scuttle. The bundles smell of sweet summer, but those fond memories are soon quashed and slushy in the mud. The twine is slit and the bales burst into flakes and sodden beasts make mirk with their heavy breath.
Galloways have a long, curly, double coat which can turn away the rain. I watch the water running off their backs and down their sides like a straw raincoat. Their only concession to this weather is to stand with their arses into the wind. They form a corral and the weather breaks upon them as if they were rocks on the shore. Once they have finished feeding, they will return to the shelter of peat haggs, whin bushes or granite scree. These animals are more comfortable outdoors on rough ground than they would be in a shed.
For all the darkness, now is a moment for snowdrops; the first skylark sings in a glimmer of light. These are fine details which might be overlooked in the busy clamour of June or July, but now they are a klaxon and a call to arms after months of starlit darkness; there is life in the world. Going about my work in these brief days, I stack snapshots in passing which combine to make the heart swell – the change is warm and strong.
I see:
The first shelduck on the wet fields, his raucous red bill reflected in a low sun
Toads on the roads, hundreds marching darkly under black and dribbling clouds
Hares running in the frost before dawn, a frizz of excitement from sober old hands.
Two sunlit days stand back to back in a flood of cold rain, and I am dazzled by their frozen mornings. A jumble of mallard cackles as they loop over the bog alders and pass round to the loch. Now is the time for their enthusiasm to spill over; drakes fight in flight for supremacy. Frogs creak in a backwater where teal have roosted the day before; the slimy creeps are couched to their eyes in a foaming soup of sex and spawn.
Snowdrops again, and now four skylarks above the moss. Herds of curlews are breaking up and growing restless for the high hills and the promise of breeding. There is a clean smell of cattle under a cloudless sky. We have two days to feel a vibration of spring, then a tumbling curtain of sleet sets the clock back to winter again.
The Celts used to celebrate this time. They called it imbolc: the first quiet steps out of winter. The word means something like ‘swelling’, and the festival comes when the cows begin to show their udders. Those folk were obsessed with cattle, and it made sense to celebrate the promise of new growth. I was hooked on imbolc when I found it because I was longing for my first calves and could almost feel the ancient excitement of new teats. The Christians tried to undo many of the old festivals, but imbolc left a stubborn mark. In the end, they absorbed the festival and called it Candlemas. I am no spiritualist and I did not mean to mess with pagan gods, but they began to mess with me. There are many ways to make sense of Galloway.
*
After three years by the sea, my wife and I had the chance to move. A farmhouse came up for sale, and some land was offered with it. It was close enough to visit while our supper was in the oven.
The place is visible from the main road, but I’d passed it for thirty years without ever seeing it. Farms like these don’t attract attention. You look through them and see nothing more than a splash of whitewash in a sea of stone, moss and blue, rounded fells.
The farm had belonged to an old boy who lived his entire life here and died at the age of ninety-two. I didn’t know Wullie Carson; I seem to be the only pers
on in Galloway who didn’t. Everybody liked old Wullie, but he saw his retirement coming and lacked a younger man to take the reins. A cold spring killed his love for lambing, so he sold off all but a sliver of his farm to a neighbour and spent the last few years of his life in peace.
We fell in love with the place, but it took nine months for us to save and negotiate the financial arrangements. It was a big step up the property ladder, if you believe in things like that, and those bleak days of desperate longing seemed to pass in slow torment. In the end it was Wullie himself who tipped the balance in our favour. The old boy hadn’t had electric lights until the nineties and pumped his water from the well by hand. Places like these are usually snapped by property developers who convert them into holiday cottages and stable blocks, then flip them back onto the market for the delectation of wealthy buyers from south of the border. But we heard that prospective developers had been sorely turned off by the old-fashioned style and layout of the farm. It was too much work, and that gave us time to get our ducks in a row.
We stretched every penny we had and begged for some we didn’t. We talked of all the plans we had for that place, and we were suddenly glad that our family hadn’t begun on schedule. We’d never have contemplated that leap with a baby in tow. Children had brought a weight of responsibility to our friends, and that killed off any discussion of risk. Even our wildest pals had been cowed by parenthood, and their smouldering ambitions were pressed into quiet caution. So it was easy to be glad of our delay on the day we collected the keys to our farm and ran, holding hands, through the close and into our new fields. This land would be our core for the cattle to come, linked to land we’d borrow from my parents and others. If we lived in the Highlands, you’d call it a big croft, a scattering of paddocks and fields across two parishes. Suddenly we had a place to get started.
I described our fields to farming friends and they asked if it was poor land. The question might have been an impudence in Angus or Berwickshire, where poverty is a shameful thing, but we’d all lived with poor land for too long to be coy; here it’s a pragmatic question. We reply that it is poor in the knowledge that roughness and difficulty is a fact of life in these parts and folk will nod and shrug with resigned sympathy.
Galloway is a jumble of geology. Rolling waves of sediment and crumbly whinstone are spattered with gouts of coarse granite. Our place lies on a blister of that volcanic stone, and the nearby town of Dalbeattie is famous for it. They say that Dalbeattie granite is the best in the world, and they used to quarry it from the hills above the town. Huge blocks were ripped up by the roots and the stone was shipped away to be made into lighthouses and harbours from Sri Lanka to Trinidad. Pathé News filmed ‘the Granite Men of Dalbeattie’ blasting the cliffs and carting stone to be shaped and cut in the 1920s. There’s a good shot of twenty men standing on a cart full of high explosives. They’re all smoking cigarettes as if being blown up by a stray spark was just part of a day’s work.
There’s no tougher stone than Dalbeattie granite. That’s a fact, but builders buy on price these days. You can get cheaper materials from China and Brazil, and so the quarry was closed and the Granite Men were sent away. Modern engineers are staggered by the work those men did by hand and horse. You’d need grand machines and hydraulic rams to do it now, and I begin to wonder if the Granite Men were really giants or titans who made the world and then vanished. Their work lives on in thunder; the hollow shell of their old quarry is enough to make you gape. We walk in their wake like weakling kids.
Further out from the town, the fields are scored and mapped with stacks of grey stone. Dykes snake and puzzle around the farms in a thousand tiny angles, then course away into the hills in striding leaps. Dalbeattie dykes bear no relation to the tidy bookstack walls you find in other places. Our dykes are something else. You need a ton of unshaped granite to build a six-foot length. Each boulder has to be hefted up and twisted into position by hand, then pinned with smaller fragments of granite so the whole thing locks together. Forget chipping or shaping this stuff to fit; that’s a non-starter. Pile three spherical boulders on top of one another and the stack is head high; it’s your job to make it stay put. They used to test the quality of these dykes by getting a man to walk along the top pushing a wheelbarrow full of stone. You can still do it on some dykes which have been standing for two centuries.
Our dykes are a work of art, and they blur so beautifully into the landscape that it sometimes feels like they were always here. The truth is that almost all of them were thrown up in the first few years of the eighteenth century. Galloway was a down-at-heel place in those days, but the Union of Scotland and England gave us a shot in the arm. We were well placed to exploit John Bull’s endless hunger for beef, and local landowners raised up new herds of cattle. They started to build dykes and turned the old common grazings into modern fields. This was our first real step towards agricultural ‘improvement’, but many poorer folk were forced off the land to make room for the cattle.
Of course there was a backlash. The people of Galloway hated those cattle, which seemed to stand for little more than selfish greed. Gangs of rioters gathered in the gloaming to pull down the new dykes with ropes and long poles. The rebels were known as ‘Levellers’ and were led by Billy Marshall, the man who called himself King of the Randies and the Caird of Barullion. They killed the cows with pikes and daggers, and things got so bad that government dragoons were called in to break them up. It was power and money that crushed the Levellers in the end, and it wasn’t long before the dykes were rebuilt and the fields restocked. Fifty years after the revolt, maps of Scotland were published which described Galloway as ‘a wild and continuous heath, feeding vast herds of cattle’. You might look at the dykes and the cattle nowadays and say that nothing is more like Galloway, but the coming of this old world spelled the death of an even older one. People say Billy Marshall died at the age of 120 and left a thousand wild tales in his wake. They don’t make them like that any more.
My first days on our ground were swallowed up with restoration and maintenance. Our thin fields were laid out by dykes, but many had fallen. Even the best stretches were patched with wire and broken pallets, and they called out for resurrection. So I mended the dykes and carried that responsibility for a few years. It’s a heavy job, and at first I lacked the knack to do it well. Sometimes my work fell back into the moss, but there were days when I could stand off and fail to see which sections were mine. My stones stood seamless beside others which have been in place for a century, overlapping with folk who have come and gone. I worked in silence and wondered if these stones were ever pulled down by the Levellers. There’s no such thing as a clean slate in Galloway, and I can only take my lead from what I know.
The granite is sharp and cold. It bites through my leather gloves and wipes my fingerprints away into purple welts. Maybe I’ve already begun to lose something of myself in this work. Some of the stones make my shoulders pop in their sockets, and my body frets that dyking will become a habit; I grow a layer of callus to give extra protection in future. All this horn will do is add an extra click to the tip tap of computer keyboards, and for now the work is just pain. I’ll need to toughen up if I’m going to make it here, and I’m pathetically grateful when dusk falls and I can slink back to the warm house through a rising gale of sleet and flying ice.
*
The time came to think of buying cattle. I began to ask around, but it was inevitable that I should be drawn to those black beasts which had haunted my childhood. I made a beeline to the Galloway Cattle Society for advice on getting started.