In the weak, blinking sunshine, wind-chilled and watery, The top fields swarm with detectorists from West Lothian, Thinly spread, rigorously spaced, slowly they move, like cautious extra-terrestrials, each has a rigid, but fluidly-swaying trunk, held just above the ground, all wear rucksacks or cloth bags that sport spade-shaped antennae.
Every so often, a detectorist drops to his knees and starts to dig, carefully refilling each hole before moving on. I greet a smiling pair of them at the gate. “I only get Sunday off, but I wouldn’t be anywhere else,” says one. Do they find treasure? Laughter rings – “be better off buying a lottery ticket for that!” But…. each has a tale to tell, of tobacco tins and Victorian pennies; last weekend, a Bronze Age spearhead – “in this very field!” And anyway, “it’s this I enjoy best,” – throwing an arm towards the hills, the grazing geese, the spruced-up-for-spring yellowhammers in the hedge – “being outside. The scenery. And the people are all lovely.”
They are. I admire their hi-tech gear, wish them luck…. And off they go again. Watching their measured tread, I know (whether they do or not) detecting’s a walking meditation, just as anglers sit and meditate on water, fish or no fish.
On a quiet day of winter sun and muted activity from woodland birds, I arrive at King’s Myre again. Reed Mace flowerheads from last year cluster around the watery margin, clogging the channel by the little jetty where the boats wait and fill with rain. We used to call them “bulrushes” where I grew up, and it wasn’t till Mr. Illesley, in Rural Studies, enlightened us all about the differences between reeds, rushes, sedges and grasses that I ever learned their proper name– or that Reed Mace is related, but none of these anyway!
It is the same plant known as cattails in America, and valued throughout its distribution for its edibility. The rhizomes – root like underground stems, or underwater ones in the case of this plant – are starchy and filling when baked. They can also be dried and ground into flour, though I never have. The pollen from the male flowers can be used as flour too, or to thicken sauces and soups. It has many medicinal uses. But the best part is the emerging shoot – which will be appearing above water level any time now. Cut, cleaned, steamed, baked, sauteed – it is a lovely spring vegetable to rivals asparagus or bamboo shoots for flavour and versatility. You can keep eating the shoots until the flower spikes start to emerge, you don’t need waders to forage it, and, as Reed Mace is actually quite an invasive plant, it’s pretty sustainable to nibble bits off the clump! Last year’s flowers are starting to burst apart now, revealing the dense, cottony-fluffy seedheads inside.
I creep through the spongy, saturated margins of the little loch at the heart of the King’s Myre, to peer through the cattails to see what wintering birds are on it today. Goldeneye, a few gadwall, mallards, a coot, typically swimming against the tide of the rest, intent on his own adventure. No sign of the swans, too early for the osprey to be home yet. In the damp woodland, waterlogged alcoves and scrapes, from which spiky, angular trees grow erratically, wait for frogs and toads to arrive for spawning. Between bare branches, multiple trunks and stems and a storm of tiny twigs, the blue sky seeps as if caught in a vast, arboreal net, reflected in patches of water.
Bracket fungi show off their smug Cornish-pasty smiles of concentric bands, on wood they share with moss and lichen, and a thousand invertebrates. Spread across the leaf-carpeted floor, long-dead logs, un-barked, silvery, yielding, are home to thousands and thousands more, riddled with holes and channels and hidden tunnels in the fungus-softened wood. On cue, somewhere in a dead tree, a woodpecker begins his first tentative drumming and drilling.
I look up into the Scots Pines, their narrow crowns dancing around each other like polite or nervous teenagers, and see the shapes of jagged sashes of sky, so clear, so blue….
Look up, look through, look between – there is much to see. Or is there only sky?
With implacably good timing, I finished my coffee to arrive at the Holiday Inn on the edge of Perth, seven minutes before the hourly bus home. Bang on time, I saw a bus crawling up Dunkeld Road. I slid to the edge of the pavement. But wait – was it a bus? No Stagecoach livery, a plain white coach, beetling along rather fast. I screwed up my eyes: nothing on the front to say what number – or any number – or destination. The tinted windows didn’t allow me to see if it carried passengers. A private coach, then? I sighed and stepped back.
As it hurtled past, driver not even glancing at the bus stop, I saw, on the side, “23 – Bankfoot”. The air turned blue outside the Holiday Inn, as I gawped in disbelief and watched it sail off without me. What to do? No, I wasn’t going to go for another coffee. I certainly wasn’t going to sit staring at a petrol garage while inhaling the noxious air of Perth’s god-awful motor mile for an hour. One does not get a “pleasant stroll” down Dunkeld Road, but eventually I began to walk towards town, undecidedly, seeking equanimity.
A couple of minutes later, just before the rail bridge, I noticed a tucked-away footpath sign: Lade Walk to Perth/Tulloch. Perth Lade is an historic man-made waterway which fed into the town’s mills. I knew the Tulloch bit, and the bit from the retail park to the City Mills, but this stretch – I never knew it existed. The Lade is grotesquely polluted for much of its length these days, but I know people who have spotted kingfishers hunting there, and the incredibly tolerant mallards of Perth make the best of it, and eat discarded chips. I ducked along a narrow path between the railway and the fenced car park of some tedious car dealer, with little optimism. Surely all I had in store were industrial lots and housing estates? The narrow path broadened as it reached the Lade, curving round from the west, and I heard flowing water and the busy furking-about of moorhens in the thick undergrowth on either side. The irritating groan of the Dunkeld Road traffic had completely disappeared, yet surely I must be not far from, and parallel to, it? To my left, a thick bank of mature trees, mostly self-sown and densely overgrown, had shed small branches and twigs in profusion during the winter storms. Accumulations of litter, initially like glue in the conglomerate of nature’s own debris, were slightly fewer than at the start, though one spot behind the ugly chainlink fence was a veritable carpet of empty beer bottles – either decades’ worth of boozing or the emptying of an accumulation someone didn’t want on their own doorstep.
Five sleeping mallards sat camouflaged on the far bank, not moving, until I got my phone out to take their photo, when they all silently uncurled sleepy heads and glided off downstream. Moorhens, in vibrant plumage ready for spring, hung about, quite tame, crossing the path and ferreting in the reeds on their spindly legs. The larger trees thinned to a narrow belt and behind the fence was a huge expanse of derelict industrial land, half-concreted or tarmac in places, but being rapidly colonised by pioneer birch. elder and other young trees. In January, all looked grey, but from the lying vegetation of last summer I could guess at the wealth of wildness that would spring up, laughing at human arrogance, when the season turned again. Bare young trees may look like a delicate screen, but never doubt their power and ability to exploit a vacuum. Nor that of the dandelions, dockens and bombsite weed, all bringing seeds and nectar to wildlife. On cue, a terrible high-pitched squeaking started up in one of the older sycamores – a flock of long-tailed tits on the rampage. I stopped and birdwatched for a while – coal tits and blue tits were weaving between the branches and a cheeping of chaffinches held forth from some bushes by the lade. On the path, first a male bullfinch, then his duller mate, landed and had a good look around before returning to the other side of the lade. Blackbirds and a thrush hopped out and eyed me beadily.
I came to a junction – a path crossed the Lade by bridge, past an old brick building – possibly a former mill but now another garage. It was attractive though, and full of potential nesting sites. Here, there was a sign on the fence – all this derelict land, stretching into infinite distance with no trace of the motor mile, belonged to the railway, which was nowhere to be seen but must be in there somewhere. I hoped it would stay their property, and they would never try to tidy it up or sell it to developers.
There were houses and flats now on the other side of the Lade, so near, yet curiously far and separated from this unexpectedly lovely and interesting walk. A large willow on the far bank was decorated with ribbons, toys and ornaments, like a wishing tree of old. I wondered who came out of their homes to celebrate or remember there. The ground on my left opened out, seeming endlessly wide. Lade and path swung eastwards and I saw an iron bridge, unmistakably a railway footbridge, just like the one I used to play under as a child in east London.
And over the bridge, where teenaged girls stood discussing the wicked-looking, monstrous-headed dog they thankfully had on a tight lead, Dunkeld Road reappeared. I swerved away from it, passed through some houses and across Crieff Road, where I joined the Lade stretch I knew well, skirting old tenements and road ends, bits of gardens and the ubiquitous smell of cannabis. Passing Stagecoach Headquarters, I surreptitiously made a rude sign. No time to march in and complain, if I wasn’t to miss the next bus as well! But thanks to their rubbish driver, I had discovered a stretch of unofficial countryside that I’ll revisit in summer, I’d enjoyed an unexpected daunder, found equanimity – and, moreover, escaped Dunkeld Road.
(It’s taken me a while to write this walk. I did it the day the clocks went forward, end of March, and today they went back again. My 14 year old collie died in early summer, and this was the first walk I decided it would be unfair to take him on, so it was a bit poignant; and weird not to have him beside me all the way.)
It began at the CLEAR Community Garden in Methil where I left Andrew to deliver a workshop. CLEAR stands for Community-Led Environmental Action for Regeneration, and is a very active charity whose stamp is all over the former mining towns of Methil and Buckhaven in Fife. We’ve worked with them a lot over the years – their compulsion to fill every available space whether roadside or cliff-top with fruit trees was one of the inspirations that got us into orchards in the first place. The Methil garden was pretty stunning; I had a good look round to admire the recycled materials, the superb compost bays (I do love a good compost heap) and pear trees about to blossom, before heading off into the cold, breezy sunshine.
Zig-zagging through Methil, side-stepping CLEAR plantings on the edges of parks and in vacant plots, till the town had morphed into Buckhaven, or Buckhyne if you like, the place of superlative pies and hidden histories, from the extravagant exposure of Fife coast geology, the sturdy cottages of Cowley Street and relics of the long-disused mine railway – all explained in panels erected by CLEAR and Fife Council.
I’ve become rather fond of urban walking lately, for the unexpected quirks of history, and opportunities to see the extraordinary hiding behind the mundane. Here, I learned of the “lost village” of Buckhaven Links, which grew, mushroom-like, on the shore when the Church of Scotland had one of its fallings-out and mislaid a large part of its congregation. Buckhaven Links did not survive too long, and is now buried under the Buckhaven Energy Park, a darkly towering set of anonymous edifices over the wall from the street.
Buckhaven Energy Park
That road took me past rows of houses with signature Fife/East coast crow-stepped gables to where Buckhyne Harbour once was, until it was abandoned due to over-fishing and used as a repository for mining spoil. Beyond the harbour site, a scramble through rocks and there was the beach, for a while and pre-pollution a popular holiday and day trip destination for Fifers and those beyond the kingdom.
Up, then, climbing skyward the Buckhaven Braes, lit by the silver of blackthorn blossom and the gold of Sea Buckthorn, peppered with orchard trees, all labelled, all immaculately pruned and protected, the coast path lined with daffodils in flower, until this extraordinary little town was behind me and I marched along westwards towards East Wemyss.
It was the East Wemyss caves that had been bothering me ever since reading that Val McDermid novel; not just to imagine fictional murders, but to see where Picts had carved strange images in bygone centuries, where people had dwelt, sheltered, hidden, picnicked and stored precious things. But first, when I passed through the woods, I came upon Macduff’s Castle – an impressive ruin whose stonework exhibited all the artistry of a carving, it is so tastefully eroded. All around its roofless vaults grew great clumps of Alexanders, a shiny-leafed, celery-like edible plant not native to these parts, but where it takes off, it does so with enthusiasm. I circumnavigated the castle before heading down the cliff to the caves.
I had been warned that the best bits of the caves were gated off by substantial railings, in order to protect the ancient carvings. You can get a guided tour of them if you go to the museum in East Wemyss, but I didn’t want that today. So I stood outside Jonathan’s Cave and used my imagination instead, then stood inside the Doo Cave, where dozens of little cubicle nest holes have been carved out of the soft red sandstone to accommodate the doos, kept for meat and eggs in years gone by. At the large Court Cave, I did my exploring along with other visitors until my excitement subsided.
Then I walked on, the sunshine now spring-warm, past a gaggle of East Wemyss monuments and memorials, side-stepping mine ventilation shafts, to re-join the path by the sea. Rafts of eider ducks sailed by, making their weird, cooing, gossipy calls, and cormorants lined up on rocks. Strange but recent sculptures in stone arose against the skyline like sentinels; I added to them, noticing how the stiff uprightness of last year’s teasel seedheads mirrored their form. Under the precipice on which the relatively modern Wemyss Castle teeters, and I was into happy little West Wemyss, basking, and its lovely cafe for tea and a well-earned salad.
Looking forward to the next Fife coast exploration!
Sunday looked a bit damp from the bedroom window, but we wanted a walk, and we wanted to be in the hills, so with beginners’ minds, not choked with assumptions about walks in bad weather not being enjoyable, we set off to Little Glenshee, to walk the Obney hills to the Obelisk on Craig Gibbon that overlooks Glen Garr. As we neared the ford, we realised we were not going to get any fantastic views from the Highland Boundary Fault over the flatlands of lowland Perthshire. The cloud base, already low, was decidedly sinking like a lead balloon. I wondered where Wordsworth was actually wandering when he spoke about “a cloud that floats on high”. It is not in the nature of any self-respecting cloud to float. Sink, envelop, infiltrate, surround, creep into you…. Not float. Anyway, we donned the waterproofs and walked.
And this is what came of it.
First came the rocks; a stony uphill path; clear water running over the blue slates, the shambles of old quarries. Upthrust from the plain, the sudden rise of hills unseen but felt in thigh and chest, heartbeat thundering in swaddled air; stones shiny, metamorphic, tale-telling, momentous.
Stones too, marked on the map, rearing through a drenching mist: “Cairn (remains of)” – markers, unknown burials or merely outcrops – “Pile of Stones”: piles which shrink as you approach across heather and fescue grass.
Then, the little things that lie beside the track: startling pink of late-flowering heaths pounce on you from the greyness of descending cloud; tiny water buttercups, iridescent ferns. And the spiders! Stalwart and smug in their jewel-encrusted orb webs, Waiting in pole position even though there’s Building still to be done. Every stem, every firework explosion of rush and moor-grass holds a magical web. Higher up, orb spiders fade away, their places taken by crowded, ill-designed but functional hammock webs, their makers hiding from shame or cunning, or just from the rain. The democracy of glistening crystal water-gems adorns them all.
And so, the water: the cloud paints every surface, you included, wet without knowing how. A little pool, no more, stretches in the mind… Arthurian legend, told by the poet: “…and fling him far into the middle mere. Watch what thou see-est, and lightly bring me word….” No arm today “clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful” rises to catch a sword, no lady in this lake. Just the mist weaving between the rushes and the ripples. Mist magnifies the shade of a ghostly tree, Tall as a mountain, shivering in and out of focus -is it there, or is it just your eyes?
And finally, the Obelisk….
The track seemed to go on forever. We had no way of knowing how much further it was to the Obelisk, since there was no chance of picking out landmarks with visibility only 20m or less, and the risk that the map would dissolve if we got it out. We waved in the direction of the much-vaunted views that weren’t there. But I was happy having my vision curtailed; there was so much to see close by, so much that surprised and intrigued. The cloud muffled sound: occasionally, red grouse materialised and flew off – “go back! go back! go back!” – or a plaintive meadow pipit called damply.
Then on our right, where the view would have been, a monstrous hill seemed to rise sheer from a deep valley we knew wasn’t on the map. But no, it was surely a bank of darker cloud – there are no hills that high here. It faded in and out of sight, until the penny dropped – it was the start of the trees in the midst of which the Obelisk stands. But so tall! And so far away, across a great canyon of a valley. “Not going there,” we said, as the track ended abruptly and we ignored ourselves to head south towards the top of Craig Gibbon. I don’t know how mist and cloud so trick the eye, but the great gulf was actually just a slight dip in the terrain, and the supernaturally gigantic trees were but mature pines and larches clustered on top of the little summit.
The Obelisk itself, looming like an ancient pyramid from the foggy tangles of tree and heath, was a wonderful thing that day. Its history is rather pedestrian – just an expression of a 19th century landowner’s ego who wanted everyone to see how far his land stretched. But the cloud slithered into its window-spaces; ferns flourished on the wet grey stone. Tiny frogs hopped among the slippery, exposed pine roots, and there were wild blaeberries for lunch.
The track we follow is purposeful. It has the directness and air not just of going somewhere, but of having been going there for a long, long, time. We get to it from another determined little track, that rises up from the calm waters of Galmisdale Bay, through woodland to the uplands of a hill farm. Side-stepping the sheep and their copious leavings, ignoring the bull who is also ignoring us as he lounges among his harem, we skirt the farmhouse and its hollyhocks, and turn onto the Grulin track.
Straight, easy, well-founded with centuries of stone and tamped by more recent ATVs seeking sheep, the track passes the remains of a fort on the left; hut circles lurk in the grass and bracken between track and cliff edge – we know they’re there but cannot discern them. To our right looms the monstrous tower of An Sgurr, the dramatic reminder of an outpouring of volcanic pitchstone that dominates the Island of Eigg.
The track becomes a path; there are a few boggy bits, and lots of ups and downs, but it is still clear, still purposeful. So many feet have imbued it with purpose. The first thing we notice that hints we are approaching Grulin Uachdrach or Upper Grulin are some angled, straight lines of raised turf. They are buried dry stone walls, created long ago from the stony, rubble-laden landscape we traverse. They mark irregular fields and enclosures that would outlie and tangle with the settlement itself. Bracken and heather, with snatches of rush and bog cotton form the matrix of vegetation, but suddenly I am arrested by an open, grassy mound to my right.
I know from the map we are not quite at Upper Grulin. But I head off for that mound, and feel a prickle in my spine, a sudden silence in my head. On the edge of that sunny clearing, I stop. The wind is stilled. Are there walls beneath me or not? I walk through – or is it over? – the softly waving pale green grass, and step – is it outside? – into the tufts of fern and heath. I think, am I walking someone else’s path, or one created by my imagination? And then there it is – a small patch of stinging nettle, the signature of the midden. Someone lived here once. So I follow their path, and it leads around the cnoc to a south-facing rocky bank covered in wild strawberries. I get it. I, too, would have passed the midden to get fruit for my porridge every summer morning.
Most of the ruins are more visible, and soon they come into view. Indeed, the first is roofed and is in good repair, with new windows and fresh white paint. It was the one house left for the shepherd when the whole village (which had held 103 people) was forced to leave – “cleared” is the unsavoury term they used for it – by the landowner in 1853 to make way for Cheviot sheep to graze the rich pastures.
The rest of the buildings are dunts in the bracken, crumbling walls, the hint of a doorway, nothing above lintel height. We continue on the track, now more rocky and difficult, to Grulin Iachdrach (Lower Grulin). Springs gush from the rocks near the path; we cross one by a rough bridge of massive unhewn rocks lain long ago. Later, we founder in a bog – the sort you hop quickly without stopping and your fingers crossed. A kestrel hovers above the ruins, claiming it as territory. Some houses of Lower Grulin are easy to access. All retain their tell-tale nettle patch after 160 years. I stop at a doorway and wonder, can I enter? Eventually I quietly ask permission, and apologise, and go through. Again, the silence, within and without. The questions, the unknown answers; long sea journeys to Nova Scotia; what is left? What is lost? What remains?
The “18 unroofed buildings, 6 enclosures and a field system” drily described in the notes on the 1880 Ordnance Survey map of Eigg to sum up Grulin are not all that’s there. A fort, probably Iron Age, sits perched on a rocky outcrop. Shielings, shelters, kilns and other buildings have been identified. And what remains is that silence – a telling scream of silence. Whatever the end story for the 14 families who were given no choice, that screaming stillness can almost be tasted, bitter and lingering.
But, on this island which has taken control of its fate, this crime can never be committed again.
One day to the equinox; officially the first day of spring. It rains, a sullen, dreich miasma and the horizon is drowned in mist and low cloud once again. No cloud of cheery celandines yet line the ditches; no coltsfoot flowers; no green dazzle of new growth erupting from the tired, forlorn and hang-dog leavings of winter stems of grass.
There was a start to spring, a couple of weeks ago, when the sun was gentle and warm and the birds practised their calls. A blue tit inspected a nest box, and rooks set-to in earnest up in the rookery tree. Today, the only sound is the drip-drip-drip of rain. And even that’s muffled.
In the soggy brown fields, where the cover crop was optimistically ploughed in a fortnight ago, soil trickles away downhill in the empty furrows. No fuzz of pink from swelling buds tints the distant birch trees, no lighter hues on the sycamores and maples. On the hazels, the merry festoons of bright yellow and cream catkins are turning brown, but no buds are opening to take their place.
Spring’s not here. I rake in the squelching soundscape of a muddy woodland walk for the chiff-chaff, first of the warblers to arrive in March, but he is not here either. I wonder if this is the day I have for so long dreaded and feared – the “what if” day. What if the the birds of summer do not return? What if I never see another swallow? What if the flowers of spring are, finally, poisoned to death? What if nests fail and nestlings starve for want of insects and worms?
I do not want to follow this thought. Spring is late and it makes me weary and anxious. My elderly dog plods on, keen to get back in the dry, tired, arthritic legs dragging, stumbling at times yet still showing interest in sticks, at least on the way back. I think, will spring come in time for him to enjoy it, to sit in the healing sun and watch the world go by, an old dog at the end of life but still game?
On the way home, I find some of those precocious hawthorns in the depth of the wood which always burst into leaf prematurely and give me my ritual mouthful of hedgerow “bread and cheese”. Today it tastes of even less than usual, but I chew away, get in the door, dry off the dog and put on the kettle.
It was a cold day of freezing fog and dull skies here on the Perthshire fringe of the Highland Boundary Fault, impenetrable and forbidding. So I went to Kirkcaldy with Andrew for the ride, and because if we’re looking for better weather, Fife or Dundee are our go-to destinations.
While he was busy pruning trees at Ravenscraig walled garden, I marched down the hill to Dysart harbour, and set off eastwards along the coastal path. Visitors to Fife usually end up either at St. Andrews or the picturesque East Neuk fishing villages, giving the old coal mining settlements of west Fife a wide berth. But I was deeply embroiled in a crime novel by one of my favourite authors, Val McDermid, at the time, and wanted to inspect the haunting locations described, where fictional things had happened and fictional people had so convincingly disappeared, for myself. In so doing, I soon met the ghosts of this once-thriving industry, and the sensed the buried but unforgotten lives of the coal towns and their protagonists.
A brick arch in a collapsing stone wall, a desire line path passing through it towards some dilapidated buildings, was all that marked the site of the Lady Blanche Colliery. I walked quickly along the fringe of the beach, where great outcrops of red sandstone, eroded into surreal shapes, looked soft enough to sleep on. Coal seams are found as a layer in a fairly predictable array of sedimentary rocks; where you find this sandstone, you are going to come to layers of shale and mudstone and where they end, you are likely to find the black stuff; ancient plant material from the Carboniferous, compressed by the weight of the rocks and the seas that came to swamp the landscape. Coal. You still find lumps of it, wave-worn, on Fife beaches. Through the middle of one gingery sandstone outcrop a channel had been dug seawards, emphasised by two sturdy walls. Something to do with the mine, or the fishing? I’m no engineer, and couldn’t work that one out.
The path veered inland and upwards, skirting a barren-looking stretch of eroding land. I smelt the Winter Heliotrope before I saw the flowers and the foliage that cloaked the steep cliffs. It’s a garden plant, that when it escapes, does so in style and quickly naturalises, especially in difficult sites and thin soils. It is so sweet-smelling you feel for it, flowering away in January when pollinators are scarce, and self-respecting native Scottish wild flowers are keeping their powder dry. But a little further on, I found wild ivy with some flowers on, too, draping itself luxuriantly over sheer cliffs. It usually flowers in November and December – valuable late nectar for bees – and by January bears ripe berries cherished by wild birds. But this was Fife, remember, and Fife does things differently. Already, the temperature was rising and a watery sun floating in and out of tangibility above the Firth.
On the very edge of Dysart, I found a striking monument to the miners of the Frances Colliery, bearing the names of all those who had lost their lives there. I found myself muttering the names out loud to myself. What a life it was for miners and their families, the precarity, the solidarity, the tragedy. Something often romanticised, yet here was the bald truth; people died, regularly. Among the names, one jumped out. Agnes Coventry, died 1911. What was a woman doing to get killed at a coal mine? Later, I found out, from the fabulous Durham Mining Museum website, that Agnes had been working at the picking table “when bending under a revolving shaft to reach some dirt which had been lifted off the tables, her clothes were caught by the shaft, and practically torn off. She was removed to the hospital and appeared to be progressing favourably, but she collapsed and died late the same day from shock. The shaft was cased in, but one of the boards which had become loose had been removed and not replaced.” Coal does not just claim its victims underground.
At the top of the cliffs, the path skirted a sinister looking industrial estate, and passed the winding gear of the old colliery, towering over the landscape and lives it once dominated and frowning down on what was now a shimmering sea where strings of cormorants stood drying their wings on half-submerged rocks. The sun, between streaks of cloud, coupled with the uphill climb to tell me I had too many layers on. I took off the thick, fleece-lined woollen jacket under my impenetrably water and windproof coat and stuffed it, protesting, into my rucksack.
There were great stretches of January-whitened grass and sunken hollows between the path and the cliff edges, badly fenced off, punctuated by warning signs declaring it the property of the Coal Authority. In the distance, several walkers had ignored the proclaimed dangers and were wandering along established desire line paths or admiring the sun-kissed view back towards Dysart. What lay beneath their feet? I ventured through a gate onto the headland for a bit, but soon returned to the path, spooked by signs about sheer drops and risk of landslip.
An extraordinarily long and winding set of concrete and stone steps led me back down to sea level and a length of tangled woodland. A solitary raven cronked bad-temperedly overhead at my intrusion into its territory. Before reaching the village of West Wemyss, the path became a rough and potholed concrete track, passing under a turreted wall whose strange arching windows with their keep-out-of-my-land metalwork permitted a peep into the overgrown Wemyss Chapel gardens. Near the harbour was a more homespun and inclusive space. Named as “Alice’s Fairy Garden” on the map, it seemed to be a melding of community projects – artwork and murals, flowers, strange odds and ends aimed at the fairies, and a memorial to “our West Wemyss Van Lady” – whose body was discovered in a campervan in the village car park in 2022. The moulded red sandstone cliffs and overhangs were the backdrop to this little patch, and to me they spoke loudly, with streaks of wind-blown layers and bedding planes, and the contortions wrought by the erosion of this soft, mellow rock.
I walked on, hugging the shore to Wemyss Castle, but I was running out of time, and there was a café in West Wemyss that I was glad to return to for delicious soup and a pot of tea, before retracing my steps (yes, even the forbidding stone staircase), past gangs of nosy seals and far more people, now that Fife had fulfilled its promise of sunshine and winter warmth, to Ravenscraig. I stopped on the beach to gather my personal stone from Fife, and found one that encapsulated the properties of the big sandstone outcrops in miniature.
Wemyss Caves, and the stretch from Buckhaven to East Wemyss, will be covered in the next few weeks. It was an eye-opening walk, a thought-provoking one… that centred not only on a landscape but the people who have been, and are, part of it. I don’t know many ex-coal miners, but I do know a few. They are straightforward, confident, cheerful and clever people. They make the very best gardeners and growers.
Early morning, sunny and dry. Silence, save for the mutterings of a river almost out of its banks and racing to reach the sea. Ground solid, unyielding – the type of hardness where you trip up on embedded clods and frazzles of vegetation hiding in the whiteness of a fourth consecutive deep frost – on ground already frozen solid by over a week of snow-half-thaw-freeze again.
Walking along the south shore of the Tay on a winter’s morning kind of ensures you won’t be in the sun very much, no matter how it dazzles the eye. In any case, the river has merrily engulfed the lower fishermen’s path that hugs its margin, so we walk, me and the dog, on the higher ground beneath the limes of the castle drive. Where are all the birds? I wonder. Not even the ubiquitous wood pigeons are out braving the cold. We pass an eroded river gulley and went down the steepish bank to the lower riverside path, joining at the point where it rises above water level and becomes what must once have been an elegant stroll for visitors to the castle. Fishing on the Tay is big business, and not affordable by ordinary people (unless you live in Perth and have the right to fish the stretch within the city boundary). We pass fishing huts on both banks that would make acceptable homes for small families. All locked up, today. No one but me and the dog.
Now I’m closer to the water, I start to notice a large number of white birds swimming rapidly downriver. What are they escaping from? Then I realise the white birds are actually lumps of ice, breaking away from the frozen banks and joining the ice and snowmelt that, with extended periods of rain, has made the river so massive today. A couple of gritty black-and-white ducks obstinately battle upriver, against the flow. What strong legs they must have! They veer off into a little eddying backwater on the opposite bank, and I see other water birds lurking there, taking a break from morning chores.
Beaver have been along here recently, but I struggle to fathom their purpose in felling one solitary tree, up the beach from the tumbling water. Maybe just hungry, or doing a bit of coppicing for future regrowth food supplies. I think the water birds could use a few more beavers to create respite backwaters.
Skirting a long curve round the back of the castle, I pass between forbidding walls of rhododendron bushes. Although they provide some shelter and a small stretch of unfrozen path. they block the view. I spend too much time trying to eliminate them from an ancient oak wood to appreciate their aesthetics. I guess they may provide good roosts for birds, though I still don’t see any.
The core path takes a long, curving route by a bend in the Tay, high above the river and nearly to Birnam before it joins the castle main drive which will take me back to the start if I go left. Closer to the castle, the trees are less scrubby and include many spectacular examples of exotic species, such as Noble Firs, Coast Redwoods and towering Pines. It becomes a landscape of avenues – tottering rows of limb-dropping beeches, stately Sequoias in orderly, sentry-like placings, frowning yew trees in sombre ranks, new avenues planted in recent decades to replace older ones that refuse to lie down and die. Best of all, to me, are the ridiculously shaggy and spreading avenues of old lime trees – each hiding in its own twiggy skirt of epicormic growth. In spring, they provide me with juicy, tender leaves for salad, and intoxicatingly sweet-smelling flowers in summer to dry and make into a sleep-inducing tisane.
As I walk between and under these vibrant specimen trees, I suddenly realise birds have started to chatter, and mixed flocks of finches, secretive tree-creepers and purposeful, hopping blackbirds are awake and accompanying me. Gazing up through the close pine trees, I can just see avian silhouettes flitting busily.
There are paths that could be taken to make a short-cut through the castle garden. Scottish access laws, some would say, give walkers a perfect right to take them, and no doubt some do. I’ve lived in a tied house on an estate where summer visitors frequently asserted this right to take a short cut to a beach through our garden, where we had small children playing and hens free-ranging – and on at least one occasion, hens were killed by loose, uncontrolled dogs. So personally, while I’m proud of our access laws, I think we should respect the privacy of residents and remember those laws also require the walker or cyclist to act responsibly. I’m fine with taking a long way round. The core path eventually passes in front of the castle at a distance (more avenues!), and I note the large, standing stone nearby, like an iceberg itself in an open, frost-enveloped field. It has no name. Does it link with other, less ancient perhaps but curiously-named stones in the area? One day I’ll hunt down the Witches’ Stone (well, this is Macbeth country!) and the Cloven stone….. but not today.
Today, I dawdle back under the limes to the gate, salute the mighty Tay with its miniature ice-packs, and begin to think about breakfast.
It began by shedding branches in every storm, this multi-stemmed beech tree. Being a beech, whose toxic leaf-litter successfully manages to put off any tree or shrub (even its own offspring) from growing under its canopy, there is plenty of space for the branches to lie. For a few years, it was my go-to place to harvest the beech-specific, edible, incredibly slippery Porcelain Mushroom in late autumn. This year, the fungus appears to have exploited all the suitable fallen branches and moved elsewhere.
No shortage, though, or other fungi. They peer from behind the remnants of bark, congregate on dead wood, splash colour over the domain of the doomed beech tree. Now, whole trunks are falling, large brackets appear near the snaggy top of the one remaining trunk, piles of branches and fallen debris cover the ground. Meanwhile, leafy twigs still emerge from parts of the tree – it’s not dead yet!
Is a tree ever dead? Though branches crash down, timber decomposes, bark is shed, these are all the signs of a massive construction programme. The mushrooms and bacteria are building soil. The mosses, lichens, ferns and flowering plants are taking hold and creating gardens. Invertebrates in their thousands are moving in, chip-chipping away, getting in, getting under, uprooting, making a tree metropolis. Birds and small mammals home in on the seething busy-ness as if to an urban food-market, finding homes in the piled deadwood and tree-openings. Human foragers like me, and other large animals such as roe deer, visit for breakfast mushrooms. In spring, chickweed wintergreen and wood sorrel will cautiously return to woodland lighter and less toxic.
As the tree slowly, and apparently, dies, it shouts louder and louder with life,
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