March’s gifts are delivered to crofters Annie Worsley and Kirsteen Bell on bog myrtle-scented winds.

Dear Kirsteen,

How are you? I have just re-read your beautiful gull poem. I was out earlier this morning in a strong gusting wind and overhead gulls were spiralling upwards, and I thought of you.

How the world has changed since I last wrote. Upheaval everywhere, or that’s the way it seems. Have you kept up with the news? I’ve been dipping in and out trying to keep pace but most of the time my head has been filled with other things.  

In the first week of March my youngest son and his wife had another baby – a wee girl, sister to Alice and Arthur, and our ninth grandchild! We went south to support the transition from relative order through the chaos a newborn brings, to some new semblance of routine and normality. 

I feel like there’s a gap in my data banks. March is so special. I love the very early signs of spring – worm casts heralding warming soils, frogspawn jellying in the bog pools, bright orange myrtle flowers blooming, and increasingly effervescent birdsong. This year, I feel as though I’ve skipped a chapter in a well-loved book.

The weather down south was wonderful which made things easier in several ways. The children could play in the garden and we walked to the local park where I enjoyed meeting some of the ‘elders’ there – enormous great beech, oak and chestnut trees. There are no very big ones in South Erradale so it was lovely to wander among such giants. And I also enjoyed the dawn chorus – often while cuddling the newest family member. Being a grandmother is a blessing. I can savour the mothering without the excessive exhaustion or anxiety. 

And although it was a joy to see the arrival of spring flowers (there was a crocus sea in the nearby Botanic Gardens), I did miss those special Highland scents of warming earth and bog myrtle. You’ll know what I mean – Myrica gale has a rather singular resinous perfume which erupts every time there’s a warming patch of spring sunshine. I absolutely love it. When we arrived home on the last day of March I got out of the car to open the gate, and there it was – a fabulous thick richness akin to incense.

The beautiful warm sunny days continued so we felt doubly blessed and very lucky. (I’d been certain rain would arrive just as we opened our front door.) Although the wider landscape of moor and hill still carries winter colours – pale blond and burnt umber – on our croft, the spring greening is well underway. 

We planted out a few more trees – crab apple and willow to replace those that failed last year. Despite those losses, we’re thrilled to see the rest in bud, ready to explode into leaf. The warm sunshine is encouraging them but I worry they’ll be bitten and burnt when the cold winds return, which they will! 

I’ve also wandered down to the beach. The old Seaweed Road from South Erradale to Opinan is turning green now and I’m looking forward to seeing what wildflower surprises emerge. The tourists have yet to arrive in Wester Ross in big numbers so it feels quiet, but along the coast, birds are increasingly noisy and boisterous. The crimson beaks of oystercatchers seem redder than ever; there are stone chats and wheatears, sandpipers and ringed plovers, rock pipits and dunlin, pied wagtails and skylarks, all rushing back and forth.

Have you seen the Northern Lights? I’ve caught them a few times and tried to take pictures with mixed results. And in the clear cold evenings, there have been one or two spectacular sunsets. Once, the western sky looked all polished and shiny as if made entirely from Egyptian faience of the richest blues, turquoise and orange. I wandered outside and although the night was cool, bats flew around my head (pipistrelles perhaps?). How is such beauty possible? I know you’ll feel the same – restoration, solace and peace come every time we step out into nature, be it garden or croft, mountain or coast. Every single time. I wish we could bottle it up, Kirsteen, perfumes, colours, songs and all, and send it where need is greatest.

Of course, it’s not all perfect. In this spring’s extra-long dry spell, everything – biomass, peats and soils – has desiccated and the threat of wild fires has grown. We watched one enormous blaze on nearby Longa Island. Roughly two square kilometres, the island sits at the northern edge of the Gair Loch and is (was) home to many ground nesting birds, reptiles and insects. A muirburn got out of hand and the entire island burned for two and a half days. Fire crews don’t attend because no people live there, and getting fire-fighting teams and water supplies across is too difficult. I understand the need for small, controlled fires to remove old, dead heather, but every time a fire gets out of hand, the losses mount up. 

There have been accidental wildfires too. Stac Pollaidh in Assynt was almost completely encircled by flames, possibly started by campers. The pictures were shocking. There were reports of dozens of adders along the roadside escaping from the inferno. Have there been any big fires down your way? Have you been affected at all? I know the hills and islands will recover but it takes time to restore lost populations of wildlife and hundreds of years to rebuild soils.

Ach, Kirsteen, we can only do our best but my heart aches. So, I turn my head back to the croft and our wee valley and coast, watching and waiting for more signs of spring, and thinking about what can we do and how can we help nature.

The weather has broken. As I write, snow has fallen on the mountain tops and a biting wind blows in from the sea, but it carries the perfume of myrtle as well as salt, so I am happy. And it won’t be long until the cuckoos return!

With love, and in hope,

Annie XX

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Dear Annie,

Your letter has me thinking about gaps. Empty spaces, and how they are filled. Yes, I read the living landscape like a book I know well too, anticipating my favourite chapters, and lamenting when some are lost. 

You asked if I have been keeping up with the news; that is the first gap. The truth is, no, I have retreated from the noise of the world a little. Trying to empty my bones of the cacophony from social media, news sites, tv, and avoiding confrontational conversations, avoiding books that tell me what I should be thinking. And while I am aware that I am missing knowledge, missing connections and challenges, I hope something stronger is growing in the opening created by their loss. Something real. I spend more time with the croft, at least.

It reminds me of those early days with a new baby, where the business of life pauses just to breathe around that wee kernel. Those dawns with your grandchild – ninth! – reminded me of May mornings with my first wee one, the sunlight making jewels of the dew and that little weight on my chest. From my hospital bed I could see a cherry tree. When I look back at that memory the exhaustion is imprinted by a riot of pink blossom against a bold blue sky.

Spring fills the margins, doesn’t it? I tell people spring is my least favourite season, but now we are in the midst of it, I can’t think why. Every appearance feels both like a first and like greeting a lost friend. There are tiny purple dog violets in the grass around the hen coop, yellow celandines and coltsfoot in the field, and the old gean tree has once again managed an unlikely wreath of white blossom on its uppermost branches. Wood anemones grow at its feet, somehow escaping the roe buck. He returns each year, diminutive and proud, an odd little Romeo barking up at our bedroom window from the birch behind the house. 

There are a group of red stags that return each year too, drawn I guess to the buds and leaves greening around us. Were some of your tree losses last year deer-related? They’re hard on the trees here, particularly the rowans for some reason. I often find young trunks snapped at head height. It is easy to imagine antlers cracking against wood. We planted two apple trees last year and these are protected by a fortress of pallets and chicken wire which, to date, the deer haven’t managed to break through. The stags have no fear of us, or the dog, despite her best efforts to chase them off up the hill. Most mornings find them back again, their rough brown coats blending into rushes where they like to bed for the night. 

L. has suggested putting a high wire around the house-fence to keep the deer out. While this would allow us to create more of a garden than we currently have, I am resisting.  I know we can’t plant tulips or roses as the deer would only eat them – but I love the blurred boundaries between their world and ours. I like that though we dug a clearing in the middle of the croft, built a house in it, circled it with posts and wire, the croft is slowly refilling the gap as best it can. It has its own gifts.

The morning after the March moon, the Worm moon – and a lunar eclipse no less – we woke to find a pair of antlers set down neatly in the mossy grass below the boys’ bedroom window. Left in the moonlight while we slept. They were shed by a young buck I think, with only three points above the brow tines. The circular white burrs where each antler was joined to the stag’s head, just hours before, were still soft to touch and laced with red. 

So the trees have a reprieve. The deer look gentler now as they browse the field. Just two bony protuberances between their ears, already velvety. Another gap, another empty space. We’ll see their crowns regrow over the next few months – I am always in awe at the speed at which they become full again.

It is a balance of energy that our human collective often misses the point of. You asked about muirburn. There hasn’t been a great deal of it here this year, though that’s unusual. The hillslope on the other side of the loch still shows darker patterns of growth from a blaze that burned years ago. Fire meant to burn lightly, to improve spring grazing for sheep, and for the deer, to create a mosaic of fresh and older heather, that got out of hand. Out of human hands. It burned deeper and farther than it was ever meant to. I remember the panic as it drew closer to the houses dotted along the shore. I wrote an essay on muirburn for a masters in Sustainable Rural Development a couple of years back, but when you mentioned the fires in Longa Island and Stac Pollaidh I couldn’t recall any of the debate and its complexities. Only the terrible driving beauty of flame and smoke. Yes, controlled and careful muirburn can have its benefits – I cling to one paper that suggested that it could help restore habitats for lapwing – but we don’t have a particularly strong track record of finding that balance between space and regrowth, do we?

Writing now though, the sky is clear and the cuckoos have returned here – I could do with another thousand words to talk about that dynamic of loss and rebirth!  I’ll have to save that for our letters next spring instead.

I hope your newly planted trees take, and I look forward to hearing when your new grandchild gets to plant their own tree one year.

With love, always,

Kx

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Kirsteen Bell is a Scottish writer of narrative non-fiction and sometimes poetry. All her words are gathered from the croft in Lochaber where she lives, and the surrounding Scottish Highlands. Her writing and reviews can be found in such places as Paperboats, Caught by the River, The Guardian Country Diary, The Lochaber Times, and Northern Scotland Journal. Kirsteen can also be found at Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre, where she is Projects Manager and Highland Book Prize Co-ordinator. 

Annie Worsley is a writer, crofter, grandmother and geographer with an enduring love of the Scottish Highlands. In 2013 she and her husband moved to the crofting township of South Erradale near Gairloch. While her husband was a community pharmacist, Annie worked on Red River Croft. She began a blog about life on the croft and then wrote essays on nature and environment for various publications including Elementum Journal, Women on Nature, the Seasons’ Anthologies edited by Melissa Harrison, Caught by the River and Inkcap Journal. Her first book about life on Red River Croft and the natural history of Wester Ross, ‘Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands’, was published by William Collins in 2023, and is out now in paperback.