The day is blue, green and glittering sea.
I’ve opened the front door, stepped in to the middle loft, from the bright to the dim coolness and a particular smell. Lavender, beeswax, hemp. I’m standing still, spooked by the solitude I’ve craved, aware of the rise and fall of my breath. Fingers tingling, I touch the scars criss-crossing the palm of my hand.
A pair of millstones encased in wooden vats girdled with iron hoops. So much wood. Exposed beams, joists, steep open-riser stairs to the top loft, and down to the lower floor, wide pitted floorboards. Now I’m placing one foot in front of the other and a floorboard creaks, amplified in the cavernous silence of the place. I fancy I’m in a galleon, in a sea of green fields. Here’s a taut rope thridden through an opening above, making its way down and through an opening below. Here’s another, and a trapdoor.
Opening doors, wooden shutters and windows, letting in the day, there’s a sense of being in an industrial museum. Cogwheels, chains, cranes and ropes to drive, hoist or haul down. The atmosphere is such that the business of milling might resume at any moment. In the smallest bedroom, there’s a threshing machine the size of a family car. In the master bedroom, the floor comprises perforated iron tiles in oxide red, and there’s a grain chute overhead. And now I’m up in the rafters, in a large bedroom with a view towards the sea. Here’s a plain table I’ll write at, here’s a chair. It’s an ascetic interior, save for the winching gear and other mill-related machinery in the adjoining bathroom.
The living room and kitchen are on the lower ground floor. I’ve made tea and I’m taking in the trademark characteristics of a Landmark Trust1 interior. Buttermilk-coloured walls, soft furnishings and hand-printed linen drapes in earthy colours. Here’s a dresser displaying sparkling glassware and Old Chelsea blue and white. Here’s an open fire with a simple surround. The housekeeper has left a vase of melancholy thistle and a welcome message on the scrubbed-top kitchen table. I’m sitting at that table, reading about the mill. The water wheel, pit wheel, the winnower, wallower, the peak stone, the burrstone.
Outside to watch the sunset. The burn spews its water over the limestone, from Tangy Loch to the Atlantic.
How strange it is to be away from home without Poppy. Though, it’s easy to imagine her here with me, air scenting. From here, she would’ve been able to smell the bladderwrack and gutweed clinging to the rocks at Tangy Beach.
We met at a farm, Remembrance Day, November 11, 2002. When she ran up to me, I thought she looked like a bear cub.
Poppy lived with an auto-immune skin disease. And unrelated to that, recovered from two major operations over the years. On another occasion, spooked by a vacuum cleaner, she jumped out of our bedroom window. A frantic journey to the clinic ensued, but she’d not even a scratch.
We enjoyed many adventures to Hebridean islands, just the two of us. We went camping too, each summer, with M and our son, in a Dorset forest. She’d swim with me in Dorset, and, one time, with a shoal of mackerel. One summer, while I was working in Edinburgh, Poppy became a regular at the park, pitch invading five-a-side. She dribbled balls like a pro. Back in Cumbria, she enjoyed playing keepie-uppies with a balloon. She was ever playful, affectionate, wily. Ever the pack animal, she read faces, mimicked expressions. She’d the best smile.
After a flareup of her autoimmune disorder, Poppy’s veterinary prescribed a short course but high dosage of the steroid Prednisone. Tests and a diagnosis of Cushing’s disease came around a year later: we managed that with love and medication. For as long - M and I had decided - as she could do the things dogs do. With a wet nose and a swishing tail. And she sashayed her way through. She did. Poppy worked the room, wherever she was. She had fun. She was fun. Beautiful. Stinky, sometimes. Lanky. Wolfy.
Poppy’s last days. A fine weekend in late June. Days teeming with new life; and the light was unreal, apricot pink, syrup. We knew it was Poppy’s last days. Perhaps she did too, ever sensitive to my emotional states of mind as she was. So many times that weekend, I wanted to pick up the phone and cancel the visit I’d arranged with the veterinary. When I’d called the clinic on Friday, I asked Scott to come on Monday. I felt calm talking to him, had never wanted to shut out the realness of it all. We discussed what would happen. I asked that Poppy have a pre-med, remembering the experience of holding a dog called Rick while he died without one.
Over the weekend, Poppy was eating, drinking. She was playful, even, as much as an elderly dog with muscle atrophy could be. She’d nose her ball towards me and I’d roll it back to her. But all these actions were brief, so brief. Fleeting glimmers of hope, as you might experience when a loved one with dementia has a lucid moment. While squatting to relieve herself, her hind legs would give way. I’d clean the feathers under her tail as best I could. Poppy, meanwhile, must’ve experienced a kind of humiliation. It was all there in her eyes and body language. She’d lost her vim and vigour.
Monday afternoon. Feelings of deep gratitude. At half-past one o’clock, Scott gave Poppy a pre-med, and soon after, another injection. She died in her preferred spot in the garden, my hand stroking her head. Our friend K was with me the whole time.
When Rick died, he didn’t leave our cottage. I saw him everywhere. He’s buried in the little meadow in our front garden, in an iron bound travelling trunk lined with grave goods befitting a Cumbrian king. But, for a time, I couldn’t conjure anything of Poppy. I didn’t see her out of the corner of my eye, didn’t mistake coats thrown over chairs or dark corner shadows for her form. I’d tell people it felt like she was somewhere else, and that it would take time for her to find her way back home. I know, I know. It sounds fey, and mawkish. But Poppy’s body was somewhere else. She was in Scotland, where a woman called Claire cremated her remains. All the same, when Poppy’s ashes came home, I couldn’t bear to scatter them in the garden as M and I planned. Neither could I vacuum the floors in our cottage. The thought of a machine she’d been afraid of sucking up the last of her fur from the rugs. This grief. Everyone’s grief. So personal and irrational.
Daisies, dandelions, hoverflies, crane flies, spongy grass, clover. Glaucous-green swords of flag iris. Frothy meadowsweet. Cleavages, dips, gullies. Cubist fields in Terre Verte, Raw Sienna. Umbellifers blooming, or spent and skeletal. Hawthorn hedges. Slender rosehips, long shadows, dusty roads, melancholy thistle. Clusters of pistachio-green samaras suspended like paper lanterns. Glistening, fat, ripe brambles, an emperor dragonfly, the berries on the rowans. I’m walking to Tangy and Westport beach, the Machrihanish Dunes. I love this route to the sea from the mill, through the fields and woodland. Naturalised fuchsia and shuttlecock ferns. swathes of butterbur. A collared dove flies from a thicket of silver willow. There’s a rope swing, lopsided and still. The remains of a tree trunk look like a sacked castle.
Here’s a tall, black Border Collie on the beach. I know it’s not Poppy; I know that. A wild hope will smoulder until there’s a dog in my life once more, but I’m feeling like I don’t want to go home, want to run away.
Over the months to come is the story of what happened next; and an account of what happens as 2024 plays out.
Among dogs with surly reputations, there is one that is fearless. Unless he sees a spider. There is family and community, there are far-reaching views, fun-loving friends, fallings-out and funerals. There is gardening and reading, debt and the precarity of the self-employed life. I am beyond midlife, taking stock, but cannot say I am living my life to the full, that I am thriving.
Lately, in the cottage I share with M and our son Ez, I’ve been dipping in and out of sensory overwhelm and intrusive thoughts. And I’m feeling the smallness of the cottage, the lack of personal space. I’ve become hypervigilant, flinching when the telephone rings, for example, and when, especially when, Ez arrives home from a night out. I cannot easily push away the memory of a phone call from a paramedic in the small hours. Another call, then another. I’m reminded our bedroom door sticks so because Ez punched a panel; and another panel on the neighbouring door.
I feed copper, silver and the odd note through the maw of a beloved cedar box, for new doors, one day. M and I hide car keys and kitchen knives, share deep fears. M cycles up and down forest paths and over the fells, comes home mud splattered, grinning. I dig deep, looking for the shape of this story. I think I’m finding it doing the things I love. Being with a dog, Alfie. Walks. A day in the archives. Making a garden. Or two.
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“Founded in 1965, the Landmark Trust is one of Britain’s leading building conservation charities.” At <https://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/search-and-book/properties/tangy-mill-12523/#Overview>; accessed Wednesday 02 January 2019
Historic images of Tangy Mill “Canmore contains more than 320,000 records and 1.3 million catalogue entries for archaeological sites, buildings, industry and maritime heritage across Scotland. Compiled and managed by Historic Environment Scotland ….” At <https://canmore.org.uk/site/38390/tangy-mill?display=image>; accessed Friday 19 January 2024
A fantastic piece of writing and love the photos too xx
Thank you. X