It’s a few hundred metres from where the crab apple tree fell to where we’ll burn it. Not a great distance, but the branches are heavy and awkward. I drag them behind me, head down like a shire horse, and the sharp twigs leave little furrows in the muddy grass behind me.
For more than two decades, it has been an annual ritual to have a Hogmanay fire on my parents’ smallholding in the Borders. First as students, then dependant-free 20-year-olds, and now parents entering middle age, my brother and I have stood in the same squashy field beneath the same silhouetted stand of alder trees. We take stock of the year with cold backs and flame-seared faces, as our wellies sink into the ooze, and our conversation is interrupted by interjections from the local tawny owl population.
What we burn is different each year. The branches, brash and assorted hedge clippings are their own record of the year, an off-fall that we purge to make way for the following season. (Most of the garden waste is either composted, shredded into mulch, or used to build dead hedges.)
We often cook on the fire. One year we attempted to pit-roast two haunches of venison for a party of 18 people. As we laid the meat on a bed of coals entombed in cold mud, it seemed impossible – ludicrous – that it would cook. So we added some extra time. But cook it did, all too well – when we peeled back the tinfoil 20 hours later, we revealed several kilos of ash.
This year we’re cooking lamb on the coals above ground, where we can keep an eye on it, and we’re mostly burning crab apple (Malus sylvestris). The biggest storm of January 2024 brought down half a tree that had grown in a lopsided fashion, and became snared by a heavy tangle of clematis. Chain-sawing up the fallen limb was my second encounter with the spiky, jagging properties of crab apple. As a nine-year-old I crashed into a nearby tree on a sledge, an accident that left a pale, sickle-shaped scar beneath my left nostril.
Now it’s almost time to burn it. I run my finger along the old wound, an action that is both automatic and reassuring, before hauling the last limb to where the bonfire will be.
• 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
