You always claimed you could find treasure in a second-hand shop. Always had a gift for it - the vintage labels that others glossed over, the little trinkets lost to clutter. The bell rings as you push through the door, and an old woman glances up from her knitting. You bob your head in a moment’s greeting, thumbing through the racks.

 

You know it by touch before you see it. Tucked between harsh polyester dresses, the impossible softness of wool. You tug it out for inspection - a jacket, light yet luxurious, draping from the hanger like the folds of hills and valleys, bold stripes breaking the brooding grey.

 

You try it on.

 

It fits. Not perfectly, but rightly. The cloth carries weight. No, gravity. It feels important on you. Your reflection in the tarnished mirror takes you in with a grin, and you know that the coat’s coming home with you.

 

Outside, the wind snakes in from the Forth, stinging and sharp with salt. You walk the harbour wall, coat fastened, collar turned up high. But somehow the cold can’t reach you here. The coat has a climate of its own.

 

And as you walk, you lean into it.

 

The diesel tang of boats gives way to woodsmoke, peat and damp. The sweet scent of thyme surprises you, and gorse crushed underfoot. Laughter curls on the wind like gulls’ cries, softened by distance and time.

 

Your boots scuff along the old stone wall, but your body remembers the earth. Peaty, forgiving soil under your now-bare feet. The brush of brittle heather. You know this path, and it’s new to you. Both can exist at once. Memories bloom behind your ribs, held close by the encompassing coat.

 

At the end of the road you take a right, and snake between bracken and briar. The view opens up to cloud-dappled hillsides, green and brown and grey. You half-hear a call of a shepherd to hound, a flurry of barks in reply, and watch as a stream of cream-coloured sheep cross the hillside like foam on the wind.

 

You unlatch the gate of your holiday cottage and pass through the low stone wall. Your eye is caught by the dark, peaty soil, bare beneath window boxes. At the same time you see shoots of newborn green, and careful hands rimed with dirt. Herbs hang in bundles from the low lintel, long skeins of wool stretch from fencepost to post, drying and warm in the sun.

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Inside all is whitewashed and clean: Ikea bookcases and board games, framed watercolours of life on the Forth. But with closed eyes you can hear singing, strange and familiar Gaelic, the constant click of the loom. And you see it now by the window: threads strung out and trembling, a dye pot simmering on the hearth, madder and marigold. Hands stained orange up to the wrist, and a basket of brockie fleece.

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And suddenly you see silver shears, keen faces of Cheviot ewes. The rhythmic whisper of steel brushing steel as fleeces fall in folds. Soft as smoke a curl drifts away, landing at your feet. You pick it up, feel the oil that coats it, breathe the scent of sun and soil.

​

You sit for a while in the second-hand coat and languish in its story, from the first sheep sheared to the final stitches. And all around you, the land seems to breathe. The curve of the seasons in the lining of your sleeves. The shearing in the shoulders, the lambing in the seams. The circle of work, the labour and love, the long-lost dye gardens and songs at the loom.

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You fall asleep with the coat wrapped around you, and dream in warp and weft.