My steps are slow across the moor, while my collie leaps away through long coppery grass. Her white-tipped tail is a periscope catching the evening light. Rowans straggle along the fenceline beside me, wind-broken and grey. If the dog wasn’t here, I might jump the fence to walk the track cut into the undulating surface by diggers, but I can’t risk her straying into the landfill. Instead, I try to follow deer trails.
I tip around tussocks and boot-sucking moss towards the lochan. I say lochan – it’s a teardrop really. A mere moment where the turf gives way to water, just enough to satisfy the still patience of a heron. It was once part of our common grazings, a source of fresh water for cattle from the crofts below. Now, ironically, it is enclosed by a livestock fence. Posts hammered into peat and strung taut with wire mark out the apportionment into which the landfill has spread.
Seeing the first glint of water always feels like a reward. Swollen by rain, it tumbles out through a hidden culvert and down the steps of the moorland. Where once it would have traversed only glacial hummocks and underground streams to reach the sea loch, today it flows straight towards a vast heap of rubbish covered lightly in soil and dusted white with hoards of gulls.
On the opposite shore, a hulking metal structure sits quietly in the gloom, oddly boat-shaped in among piles of grit and gravel. As dusk deepens, the surrounding mountains gather the machine bulk into themselves.
Rutting stags bellow through the dark. Heard from our house, they could almost be cows lowing on the hill again, but up here, channelled through the mountains, they sound prehistoric. Sweeping in over their bass comes the chorus, seesaw squawks from greylag geese that arrow in over the dump sheds and crooked orange digger arms.
The flock turns once in the air before descending on to the wee lochan, necks stretched forward as they streak into the water, shadows on silver and rust stuttering gently to a drifting stop. Like the deer that can step over the fence to drink, this lochan is to the geese as it has always been: a small shelter against the night.
• Country diary is on Twitter/X at @gdncountrydiary
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
