The Moorland Ghost — A Story-Weaver's Tale of Longing, Land, and the Hen Harrier

The Moorland Ghost — A Story-Weaver's Tale of Longing, Land, and the Hen Harrier

The Moorland Ghost

- as told from childhood memories and wild imaginings belonging to Clare, as the Story-Weaver

Every story I tell is born of longing, dear sister. Come rest beside it for a spell, and I’ll keep the hearth warm for your own.

It lives in the hollow between heartbeats when the wind smells almost, almost like home. It’s the kind that lives in the marrow—an ache that hums beneath the day’s unending duties and never quite quiets. It is the longing for rain-dark soil, for moss-damp air, for the sound of blackbirds quarreling in a hawthorn hedge. It is a homesickness deeper than geography.  Although full of gratitude for the life I have built a half a world away from the island that first taught me the language of leaves, my heart still dreams, bone-deep, in the dialect of her hedgerows.

There are days when the ache flares sharp as flint—when the high-desert valley wind hisses where the sea-mist once rolled, and I would give anything for the damp scent of peat and woodsmoke, or to sit in the vibration of primordial woodland. On those days, I turn to what has always saved me: the weaving.

I weave with plants—their wisdom pressed into balms and elixirs, their old remedies humming through my fingertips. I weave with stories—threads of folklore and memory twined together until the ache becomes meaning. And I weave with scent—for fragrance is its own kind of remembering, able to carry us home faster than thought.

These weavings are how I make peace with distance. Each tale, each blend, each flicker of flame becomes a small act of nostalgic return—a way to walk the moors and woodlands again without leaving the mountain garden I’ve tended here in the fierce-as-flint Rocky Mountains. Sharing them is my homecoming. Through story and plant and scent, I find myself not quite so far from the girl who once marched through wetlands, wellies full or bog-water, who followed bees through fern tickets, nor from the land that still hums unseen beneath her feet.

And so, it began—my longing taught me to weave with plant, scent, and story; not only to soothe my own homesick spirit, but to offer a hearth-light to any sister who has ever felt this bone-weary longing for a place she may never have been, yet somehow remembers.

So, sit with me a while, love. The kettle’s just beginning to sing. Let me tell you what I remember of the old country—of roots and wings, and of the Ghost who guards the moor.

When the mist gathers low across the uplands and the heather takes on that bruised-wine hue between dusk and dark, the moor seems to breathe. It is then, when all other wings are folded and only the curlew calls her lonely note, that the Ghost of the Moor glides from the vapor.

She comes soundless—earth toned and creamy—the Hen Harrier, though most never name her so. They call her She of the Low Flight, or simply the Ghost. I have watched her rise from the bog edge where sphagnum drinks the sky, her movement more mist than muscle, and felt the old stirring that every marsh-born soul must feel: ephemeral awe, and the ache of belonging.

She hunts not from heights but in long, level sweeps, skimming the dense fierce-hearted gorse thickets so close they bow beneath her passage. Beneath that spectral calm lives her own fierce patience. Her broad wings catch every whisper of air; her face—round and solemn as an owl’s—funnels the faintest sound of vole beneath moss. When she stoops, it is sudden as revelation. Yet even the death she brings feels part of the pulse of the land, necessary and almost tender. ¹

Long ago, the fenfolk said she was once a woman wronged. A healer, perhaps—a cunning woman—driven from her hearth for knowing too much of roots and moonlight. They say the moor took pity, clothed her in feathers, and let her keep watch over its solitude. Others tell that she is the spirit of the moor itself, born each dawn from vapor, dissolving again by dusk, forever hunting the lost songs of her young. Every legend agrees on this: she keeps the balance. Where she flies, the heather thrives and the voles stay many but not too many. The Ghost is both mercy and measure. ²

To see her is to know contradiction: the male, silver-grey, a raptor of moonlight and silver-misted luminosity; the female, russet and earth-toned, fierce as flame and sun-burnished heather. Their union a mirror of dusk and dawn—the dying and the reborn day. Imagine dearest, if you will, the fleeting acrobatics of the ringtail female rise with a vole clenched in her claws, crying sharply for her mate. From the far ridge he answers, dropping and tumbling from the sky like a blade of light, and in mid-air she passes him the kill. It is a dance older than kings and crowns: the sky feeding the ground, the ground giving back, a sky-dance. ³

Her nest is no more than a hollow pressed into heather. There she hides four or five downy chicks, each no bigger than a clump of moss. The moor protects her if it is left whole. But when drains are cut, when the heather is burned too often, when grouse are prized above all else, the Ghost fades. There were years in England when she nearly vanished, shot for daring to share the moor. Even now she haunts as much as she lives, returning where the bog has healed and the water stands once more. ⁴

On many an evening I crept out unseen—or so I fancied, until my wellies left evidence to the contrary all the way from the back door of our stone-walled cottage to the bog. Sometimes I felt her presence before I saw her—an unease in the air, a hush that gathered meaning. And then she was there, gliding through the dim like a thought I almost remembered. The fox paused mid-step in the fringes; the rushes stilled their whisper. In her passing lay reconciliation—between what we take and what we owe, between the wound and its slow greening.

There is a saying among the peat-cutters: “Where the Ghost flies, the moor is mending.” I hold to that. The harrier’s flight is not just survival but absolution, the land forgiving us in feathers and silence. Each season she returns, pale against the purple bloom, to remind us that wildness is not gone—it only holds its breath for our quiet reverence.

Sometimes, even here beneath the vastness of the Rockies, I think I glimpse her—a russet flicker over the sagebrush, a trick of light that snatches my breath and leaves a quiet “wow” hanging in the air. And when the fog folds close and even my lantern seems reluctant, I speak to her aloud. “Fly low, sister,” I whisper. “Keep the balance, for all our sakes.” And if the reeds—or perhaps the tall grasses of this foreign valley—stir in answer, I like to think it’s her still: the Ghost of the Moor, brushing the world awake one more time. For when the Ghost of the Moor passes, even the sleeping earth remembers how to breathe.

Endnotes:

  1. Hen harriers hunt low over open moorland, using a facial disc to detect prey by sound. Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), Species Guide: Circus cyaneus (2024). https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/hen-harrier
  2. Oral folklore associating harriers with transformation and female spirits recorded in Scottish and Northumbrian field collections; see Hatfield, Gabrielle, Encyclopedia of Folk Medicine (2004); Paine, Angela, The Healing Power of Celtic Plants (2006).
  3. The “food pass” courtship exchange between male and female hen harriers is a documented behaviour unique among British raptors. RSPB Research Notes on Breeding Behaviour (2023).
  4. Hen harrier population declines and conservation recovery: DEFRA Upland Wildlife Report (2022); RSPB Geltsdale Restoration Project data (2024). Also, https://www.rspb.org.uk/helping-nature/what-we-do/protecting-species-and-habitats/projects/life-and-hen-harriers

Further Reading for the Curious Mind - (with gratitude and deep reverence for the Trusts, Authors, and Researchers who keep these stories—and their wild homes—alive):

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