13 - The harsh riverscape

Summary

(Cultivating a Highland croft)

The byre and stacks in ordered row

The means of life affording show.

With crooked spade or coulter-vee

Upturned the sparse deep ground

‘Mid bog and rock so pressingly

The run-rig strips abound.

And lazy-beds of labour slow

Cover the hillside slopes below …

With sheep nose-down on pasture lea

And cattle by rough bound.

(in McLean, 1961)

Troutbeck Tongue is uncanny, a place of silences and whispering echoes. It is a mighty tableland between two streams. They rise together, north of the Tongue, in one maze of bogs and pools … They meet and unite below the southern crags, making the tableland almost an island, an island haunted by the sounds that creep in running water … From the highest point of the Tongue I could look over the whole expanse, Woundale and the Standing Stones; Sadghyll and the hut circles; the cairns built by the stone men; the Roman road; Hollilands and Swansdale named by the Norseman; and the walls of the deer park stretching for miles.

(Potter in Lane, 1968).

O God of the heaving sea

Give the wave fertility

Weed for enriching the ground

Our life-giving pouring sound

(in McLean, 1961)

[Iona Prayer for seaweed, showing how important it was for fertilising the Scottish Highlands fields: and that the best fertiliser was from the sea, not the land]

Their slain shall fill their valleys and brooks, and the river shall be filled with their dead, till it overflow.

(Judith, 2, 8.)