A Hare-raising Tale

Jim’s day on Flanders Moss sees an abundance of hares showing off their grooming rituals as they get ready to box

FLANDERS MOSS is a raised bog, a wide-open and flat sprawl of land and water between the fields of the Carse of Stirling and the foothills of the southernmost Highlands. An encircling rim of birchwood ropes the Moss off from both fields and foothills.

These birches not only define the Moss, they also cloak the gentle slope that delineates it from the fields and puts the “raised” into “raised bog”. An ancient build-up of peat and the high water table have heaved the surface of the Moss about 30 feet above the fields. Brown hares move effortlessly between the two worlds – the firm Lowland fields and the malevolent uncertainties of the watery, yielding Moss.

Come May, when the fields transform into some of the richest grass in all Scotland, the hares’ presence is exuberant and blatant; now, in February, in the sodden, heathery and snow-patched birch woods, they are as inconspicuous as woodcocks in winter bracken, and with the same tendency to explode from beneath your feet.

The weather had been wet, wearyingly wet, that species of wet in the face of which even the normally serviceable Scots word “dreich” loses its potency. The Moss seeped water into every surface cavity and hollow, and made mud slicks of deer trails through the birches. A repertoire of treacheries awaited every footfall: pools of unguessable depths, God knows how many variations on the theme of sphagnum moss, miraculously concealed and duplicitous patchworks of ground cover that alternated almost firm footing with knee-deep, mudsucking torture chambers every square yard – unless, that is, you are a roe deer, a fox, a pine marten or a brown hare, for these travel light and know the ground and all the sure-footed ways through it.

The trees want to turn the Moss into a birchwood. The Moss wants to reclaim the wood and fights back with water and ooze. It is a national nature reserve where the management policy consists largely of repelling the birches’ advances, stifling old drains to keep the water table high where the Moss likes it and generally giving the bog its head. Still, I am a quiet admirer of the fringing woods and so are the brown hares.

On a day of merciful respite from a week of wet south-westerlies, the sun stirred, remembered what it was there for, and steamed the woods with sudden warmth that spoke of imminent spring. I followed my preferred path into the trees, paused by my preferred tree where my habitual leaning presence has begun to wear away lichens from the bark, and bark from the tree. I pause there to consider the day, to look around, to listen to the land. This process of effectively becoming landscape is perhaps the most productive of all my rituals and techniques for trying to come close to nature.

I caught the sense of uncertain movement further out where the wood became more open, the trees more 