I am on the Moss to look at the possible fencelines where we would like to reintroduce grazing. It is a cold, bright morning, a complete contrast to the previous few days and it is a joy to be out under a full sun for seemingly the first time in days. This corner of the Moss is strange and wild, it is edge land, on the very perimeter of the mound of peat but it hasn't had the attention of the "improvers" in the past that other parts have and so still has some of the natural features of an edge of a raised bog. It is a corner of collapsed twisted old sallow pollards that hint at a very different way of managing the land and huge tussock 
sedge mounds that look like a scattering of Tina Turner's wigs after a big concert. This corner is still very wet and in parts positively hazardous. Water drains off the surrounding lands and because it can't flow up onto the peat it collects on the moss edge. A mat of fen plants grow over the surface which when you walk across wobbles in a very nerve racking way. Beneath the mat is a metre or two of liquid peat and if you went through the mat it would really spoil your day. This is what the bog experts call "lagg fen" (the lagg being the edge of a bog). It is along the edge of this lagg fen that we want to fence. This will get an area grazed that hasn't been grazed for tens of years and the action of the stock will bring back the wild flowers that have become swamped by the rank grasses. There is a lot of planning for this type of work, landowners and neighbouring landowners to be met, graziers to be contacted, landowners agents to be avoided and possible fencelines to be agreed. And that is all before contractors are brought in to do the work.Gradually the air warms up, the frost disappears from the mosses and grasses and the colour scheme of the bog goes from monochrome to harris tweed. A raven cronks in the distance and a couple of greater black backed gulls, strangers to the area, head south west almost certainly on a nefarious purpose. Out in the middle it feel like you are book-ended by the Wallace monument at one end of the Carse and the Mount Fuji-like Ben Lomond at the other end. Not good weather for bogs but it is due to rain tomorrow.
