A Love Affair with Drygrange (Lauren's Photos)

I’m in a relationship with woods and moss and dappled sunlight

I fell in love with Drygrange the first time I visited. It was a sunny day in May. We had just started house-hunting – in fact, this was the first (and only) house we viewed. We were only viewing this one because the one we wanted to view was under offer already. We were feeling a little guilty for wasting the seller’s time on a viewing that would never lead to a sale. I was slightly hungover and eating a sausage roll on arrival, from what I remember. Despite us both having grown up in the Borders, neither Ross nor I had been into Drygrange before. You come in a long rhodadendron-lined drive. It goes past a big nursing home – which used to be the estate house – and round toward the courtyard of houses we now live in. It felt a little bit like you shouldn’t be there, a secret you weren’t supposed to find out about. Everything about the house and about Drygrange charmed us on that first visit – the warm yellow light streaming into the house, the flower-filled garden, the community orchard, the trees, the allotments, the paths, the trees, the trees, the trees. We went from apathetic to deeply in love at some speed. No second viewing required, we were head over heels.

I was then the most anxious house-buyer in history because I have 0% chill when I am in love. But by the end of July we were sitting eating chips on the floor of an empty sitting room. I didn’t know it, but I was pregnant with our eldest, and this would be the home we built our family in. And I can honestly say that there isn’t a day since then that I haven’t felt grateful for Drygrange and a good good house.

I got to know the details of Drygrange a lot better in the spring of the first lock-down during the pandemic. By then we had a 10 month old, but Ross was furloughed, so there was plenty of scope for long walks with the dog round the paths here. I learnt the names of the succession of wildflowers in the woods, sketching them as I went. Our little boy practiced his wobbly steps holding our hands down the paths. We came up with our own names for our favourite places: Kingfisher Corner, Otter Bay, the Spooky Wood etc. Flasks of tea were taken on walks. Birthday cake was eaten by the river. We put down proper roots into the earth here. I have never felt more horribly embarrassed by my own privilege. To have a corner of wild and beautiful that is mine to explore and be in relationship with makes me the richest woman on the planet.

Now, somehow, already, we’ve been living here for over seven years. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a tiny splash of time compared to the forever I am aiming for. But there’s something lovely about beginning to recognise the rhythms of a place: every August, the rooks sit on the fence posts in the paddock in the mornings; the red admiral butterflies sun themselves on the warm stones in the courtyard on sunny September days. The thrush whacks open snail shells against a stone planter in the back garden in the evening in May. We picnic amongst the snowdrops in the woods in February. The longer we live in this magical place, the more there is to know about it.

In October, the most glorious month of the year, my friend Lauren Jamieson of The Colourful Edit came to take some photos with me in the woods. I took her to one of my dearest spots – down by the Little Turbine House, where the ferns and the brambles are reclaiming the riverbank; where wrens flit between the branches; where deer drink from the pools; where the sunlight splices through the trees directly from the heavens. These are some of her photos (thank you so much, Lauren!). Drygrange in October, the most beautiful place on earth.

Inevitably, I sat on a mossy log and got a very wet and muddy bottom. Drygrange is beautiful but very rarely actually dry.

If I can live out my days drawing the trees and the birds, walking these paths with my flask of tea and my sketchbook, I think I’ll have lived a really good life. Especially if there are biscuits.