This painting shows a peat bog or ‘moss’ as weary horses make their way along the path at the end of the day, their carts stacked with fresh peat to be dried out and used for fuel. The Highland landscape setting is imagined. Graham’s painting is not an illustration of a literary subject, but when it was exhibited in 1867 it was accompanied by a modified quotation from the poem Retirement (1758) by the Scottish poet and moral philosopher James Beattie: 'When in the crimson cloud of eve / The lingering light decays'.