Nowhere else to go

By Fiona M Jones:

I’ve always loved moss, and I can’t explain why. In my view, every stone wall should be covered in moss, every wooden fence-post topped with it like a tiny wig, and every unfrequented roadway carpeted in vivid velvet-textured life. 

I like to see the crumbling brickwork of nineteenth-century coalworks swallowed up in a slow tsunami of mosses, and I like to watch old fallen trees turn green again in its grip. I like moss so much that when my children were little and they’d invent imaginary solar systems, they always made a green mossy planet for me—and they’d leave me there with a cup of tea while they waged their spaceship wars on intergalactic baddies. 

I’ve never understood why people wage war on moss, blasting it from their stonework and spraying their lawns to kill it. Moss isn’t a baddie. I feel a secret sense of triumph when I hear of city councils, desperate to solve their crisis-level air pollution, building concrete frames of mosses to purge their unclean air. They’ve finally discovered that moss knows what to do with diesel fumes as well as bare ground and fallen trees. 

And here’s my favourite place of moss, in these Coronavirus-shutdown times when Boris has told us we can only Walk From Home, and Once A Day; and the local farmers say Don’t Touch Our Gates. From Crossford village you follow Waggon Road south to the 985, then walk along to the right until the Charlestown exit. Just before the narrow bridge, you take an almost invisible footpath to the right, skirting a new plantation of baby trees still hidden inside their protective tubes. You find yourself quite suddenly above a rushing burn in the greenest valley you’ve seen for months—sheltered and damp and multi-hued in green where new spring growth has just begun to compete with the darker tones of ivy and the yellower greens of moss. 

Down the trodden path beside the noisy water, you come across the remains of stone buildings, ruined, rebuilt in brick and metalwork, ruined once more by time and creeping vegetation. A semi-cylindrical metal barn, the most recent building, stands open too, disused, roof sagging and ready to fall in a cascade of asbestos-laden rubble. Most of these constructions would have pertained to coal-mining. Across the burn, on the steeper side of the valley, three long-abandoned coal seams open onto the burn, mysterious dark entrances of sliding scree hung over with ivy from above. 

If you follow the burn downhill, you come out under a disused railway bridge, full of nesting birds, on to a flat muddy shore of driftwood, seaweed, flotsam and seabirds; and here, if you look in the right place, you can find multitudes of squirming, wormlike fossils in the crumbling mudstone above the tideline. 

Assuming you’re wearing sturdy clothes you can fight your way along the ivied, brambling railway until you come to lower Charlestown, then back around by road to make a longer walk. Because, after all, it’s springtime, the clouds are almost shining, and we’ve nowhere else to go. 

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Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.