Only you can write your book...

As I walk up and over the brow, I leave the shelter of the hill and feel the sea breeze kiss my cheeks. I look back down the slope that I have scrambled up. Calina tries to navigate the small ditch at the bottom of the slope, her three year old legs dragging through the heather.  “It’s too deep to cross there. It’ll go over your wellies!”, I call down.  As soon as the words have left my lips I realise that she will probably find this quite an appealing prospect. I change tact, “It will be freezing, then you will be cold, wet and sad and we won’t be going home for hours!”. She looks at me, then at the water before turning right and following the bank of the ditch.  “Keep going!”, I shout, “See where the stones are higher. Can you see the bottom? It is shallow there, cross there!”  She scans the water and finds the area that I describe.  Deftly, she crosses and scrambles up the slope - on hands and knees for some of it - to join me.  We cuddle and I point out the buzzard flying overhead.  

---

I’ve been at my desk all week, immersed in paperwork and trying to get my head around the latest changes to agricultural subsidies and the required forms to fill in/boxes to check.  I’ve been taking notes, cross referencing, quizzing people on the phone. I have umpteen tabs open - Carbon Auditing, Biodiversity, Soil Sampling, Scottish Government, Muirburn legislation, Whole Farm Plan….the dictionary to double check that we’re all on the same page.  The deeper I go, the lower my mood drops. I find myself losing all confidence.  There is going to be so much paperwork to do, I accept that. What is harder to swallow is the underlying tone.  The accusation that agriculture is somehow ruining the planet.  That farming is causing climate change.  That our population should be eating less meat.  

I shove the paperwork to one side and take a sip of - now cold - tea.  Is this what I signed up for? My daughter plays under my desk.  She has a herd of plastic animals. Cows, sheep, pigs. They are all lined up and she makes them chatter away to each other.  Ships sail from China with shipping containers packed full of plastic tat toys like the many that litter my house.  Plastic toys that are so poorly made they are practically disposable.  They serve no purpose and could be replaced by a stone, piece of wood or a rag doll.  In 1992, a shipping container full of toys fell off a ship. Amongst other things, 28,800 plastic ducks were released into the ocean.  The planet is constantly being needlessly polluted by greedy companies but I’m sitting here reading about how bad cow’s natural gases are for the environment.  

Feeling deflated, my husband asks if I want to come and help gather some sheep.  I feel like I should continue trying to make sense of the paperwork requirements in front of me.  But I also feel like my head is going to explode and I just want to give up.  So I grab my wellies and a woolly headband.  Of course I am coming.

---

  The buzzard hovers up high. His wings are outstretched and his eyes are focused on the ground below.  If it wasn’t for the wind swaying him gently, he wouldn’t be moving at all.  “He is looking for his dinner,” I explain to Calina, “As soon as he sees something small moving, he will fly down so fast and catch it”.  While we wait for the sheep to appear, we search for Summer wildflowers.  The orchids are popping up everywhere. The children have always laughed when I say that orchids are protected - “But they are everywhere Mum!”.  We look at the lichens and mosses growing on the stones.  With their jaggedy borders and interesting shapes, we pretend that they are little countries.  We make little men with sticks of heather and take them on expeditions around these new, mossy continents.  Calina is attracted to a large stone a few metres away.  The lichens look especially attractive and delightful over there.  I stop her. 

“Look at the ground,” I say, “See how it slopes down and looks like a hole?”. She nods. I continue, “The grass looks a bit different, doesn’t it? That’s a bog. A dangerous bog.” She looks more closely at the ground. “The mud looks like jelly”, she says.  “It would gobble us up”, I warn, “Don’t walk in places where the ground looks like that. You’ll die”.  She knows when I’m serious.  

These lessons can’t be learnt from books; the difference between the call of a buzzard and sea eagle as they pass overhead.  The intuition that tells you, even from a distance, that a sheep isn’t right. The smell of an incoming thunderstorm. How to move quickly on uneven ground, while simultaneously listening for the sound of hidden drains.  

Paperwork and greenwashing exhaust me, but out here, teaching my child the lessons of the wild, I feel rejuvenated. I feel alive and I feel happy. I feel confident again and my insecurities blow off me, straight into the Atlantic to be destroyed by the waves and eaten by sharks - hopefully.   

A formation of geese passes in a hurry and on the horizon from behind where they came, we see my son and his dog. They are silhouetted against the sky as they bring the sheep along the daunting cliff edge.  Our playing over, Calina and I begin walking over to meet the flock and bring them in. 

I know my sheep and I know our land.  I can’t feed into this narrative that someone sitting in an office, maybe in the job for mere months, knows my land or sheep better than me.  I can’t accept that someone knows the land better from a satellite image that we do from feeling the earth under our feet. Especially when their guidance comes from a place based on the government jumping on the latest political bandwagon.  I’m not interested in politics.  We’ll keep looking after our environment because we want to - not because it is politically fashionable.  I don’t want to change the world.  I just want to be able to carry on doing what we are doing.  

Farming is strange.  All farmers work under different conditions and in different landscapes. We all have different, unique challenges and goals.  I wouldn’t dream of telling someone in Yorkshire, Wales, the East Coast of Scotland or even 10 miles down the road how they should be doing things.  We can exchange information, ideas and tips but we have to have faith in the farmers on their own ground, with their own stock.    

Many lessons can’t be learnt from books. And one thing is for certain, nobody has written your book.  Only you can do that.