The Difference a Drop of Rain Makes

A Post for West Stormont Woodland Group

https://www.weststormontwoodlandgroup.org.uk/

Five Mile Wood today is a wood part-forest, part scrub and heath. When the Forestry Commission took out the last tree crop, they left a fragile fringe, largely of Scots Pine, around the north-east side of the circular path that now forms almost the only access to the bulk of the wood. The Benchil burn trickles through and under the path here, on its way to the Tay, and water from the high water table of the central area percolates into a series of pathside ditches and curious water-holes made by a forestry digger. This is the wet side of the wood. While the trees must take up a lot of water, their canopy also prevents evaporation, and after recent heavy rain, the glades and ditches are alive with summer flowers and butterflies.

Sphagnum, Lesser Spearwort, ladder ferns and willows congregarte in wet ditches.

Heath Bedstraw and Tormentil are strewn along the path edges like yellow and white confetti, and red clover flourishes heroically on the banks. Meadow Vetchling and Bird’s Foot Trefoil are visited by brown ringlet, wood white, common blue, and pearl-bordered fritillary butterflies, who pause and spread themselves out infrequently on warm stones and bark shreds on the path.

Bright Hawkweeds grow tall and enthusiastic, stretching for the dappled sun that today is scorching whenever the clouds part. In the cooler shade, sweet-scented Valerian grows. It prefers a damp habitat, and its white to pinkish flowers are nectar-rich, a magnet for more butterflies. This plant is widely used in herbal medicine, its roots being a soporific. Common Orchids and Viper’s Bugloss unusually share a habitat. Here and there are thistles, always a good bee-flower, and today a relevant newcomer to central Scotland, the Tree Bumble Bee (Bombus hypnorum) is engrossed with nectar collection.

The true nature of this tract of land gives itself away in the damp bases of ditches and where vague deer tracks can be followed a short way into the springy sphagnum. It is part of a network of raised bog, myre or moss that probably once were joined. King’s Myre in Taymount Wood is another remnant. Damselflies hover over the multicoloured water forget-me-nots in conjoined pairs. The Lesser Spearwort dazzles from many a watery ditch and aptly-named Ragged Robin, dances its frilly pink skirts by the burn. Acid-loving and ubiquitous tormentil abounds, and bell heather is in flower already – another treat for insects.

Chickweed Wintergreen peeks out from ferns and sphagnum mosses

We humans are such visual creatures, and it’s the flowers that draw us and grab our attention. But flowers are the tip of the ecological iceberg of the wet side of the wood. Ferns, grasses, unidentified rushes and reeds are the matrix of this habitat, while unnoticed and unobtrusive, the sphagnum mosses proiliferate, and go on with their work of creating peat, holding onto water – and capturing carbon.

How the woods work to heal us.

Clockwise from top left: Red Clover, Valerian, Viper’s Bugloss, Ragged Robin, Common Spotted Orchid

Creeping Up On King’s Myre

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Hot, sunshine, slight breeze – a day to cycle to a cool and shady place. We’d often thought about walking into Taymount Wood by the core footpath from Airntully, but before lockdown hadn’t considered cycling all the way from Bankfoot. We left the village on the Stewart Dairy road, in normal times screeching with haring rat-runners with no conception of cyclists or passing places, and up the steep Barns Brae. This we accomplished without pause for breath, thanks to the electric bikes! We were caught out at the top by two “proper” cyclists who had stopped to recover, and who tried very hard, in a typical show of pandemic goodwill, not to look supercilious.

From the hamlet of Airntully, with its handy share-and-donate community phone box, we entered a shady tunnel of hedgerow elms, that enclosed our path. A shivering mosaic of sunlight hovered over the blue of speedwells, the pink of purslane. The path quickly led across a road and over the main line level crossing, straight to the fringes of Taymount wood.

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In contrast to our last visit in March, most trees were in full leaf. Violets flowered happily in the shade. It was now drowsy midday, and – again in contrast to March – the birds were silent, save for a welcoming chiff-chaff.

The silver line of King’s Myre appeared through the trees on our right. Parking the bikes, we took a small deer path between the trees towards the water. You cannot “go to” King’s Myre, nor can you arrive. There is no division in this habitat, between wet and dry, no shoreline, no edge. You have to creep up on it, with the stealth of an amphibian or a mudskipper. The ground underfoot grew softer, violets gave way to arching horsetails, until the trees petered out into scraggy bog willow and the soil became sphagnum moss. If I stood still, water came over my shoes.

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Under the last tree, whose roots appeared to have made a spot dry enough for tormentil to grow, we sat down to picnic and observe. An osprey, also in search of lunch, circled the lochan. Fluffy seed of the reedmace bowled about the water margin like tumbleweed. Blue damselflies hovered, veering abruptly as if skating on air. Red damselflies were better camouflaged, except the one that alighted briefly on my knee!

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There were many small, dark solitary bees. Where they were foraging? They ignored the yellow tormentil, and I could see no other flowers. But a squelchy walk among the bog willows revealed several orchids, probably marsh but I’m hopeless on orchids, and the staggeringly lovely fringed flowers of the bogbean (Menyanthes trifoliata), just coming out.

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Back to the bikes, and on through the wood to the main entrance on the KInclaven road, streaming away on downhill paths through heady clouds of coconut scented gorse. By the time we reached the birch trees, the birds were singing again. We returned via Airntully phone-box for a book to while away the rest of the afternoon.

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This post was written for West Stormont Woodland Group, in support of the plan for community buy-out and wider community use of local woodland and landscape.

Glacial Loch: a Tale of Horizons

Loch Leven in Kinross-shire, along with Clunie Loch and Loch of the Lowes (and the ospreys) in Perthshire, and Scotland’s only Lake, the Lake of Menteith in Stirlingshire, was scraped out by glaciers in the Ice Age, then filled with sand and gravel as the glacier retreated – and hence is shallow, broad, wreathed in strange mists, and horizontal in tone. Wide enough to be a honeypot for thousands of wildfowl in winter, secret enough for a Queen to be imprisoned on one of its islands, shape-shifting and elusive enough for ghosts and rare species.

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Walk around its margins; there will be places from which the opposite shore can barely be discerned. Go on a grey autumn day when the rain in the air seems suspended in horizontal bands, and upsurging clumps of grass and reeds appear discordant, almost angry in their violation of the horizontal.

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Here and there you’ll find beaches, sandy from the glacier’s retreat; the wind makes small glacial waves that smell of no sea but fool the dog – and then it becomes still. Bands of horizontal clouds are reflected in the mirror surface of the water; subtle stripes of cream and grey and black and white, settling on the horizontal tops of the surrounding hills.

grassofparnassus Pockets of peaty marshland, studded in autumn by vivid blue sheeps’ scabious and emphatically solitary flowers of the Grass of Parnassus, spiral around flat pools of oily water, reflecting snatches of sky. Larger raised bogs, pillaged in previous centuries for their peat, lie flat and sullen. When the peat was no longer wanted, they grew conifers on the “useless” land. lochleven5 Now the conifers are retreating after the long-forgotten glaciers; the water returns; dragonflies, amphibians and sphagnum once more fill the horizontal expanse between the forest. Heaths and ling guide the trespasser to the dryer paths, and felled branches bridge the bog where water maintains its horizontal sovereignty.

lochleven6 In fields by the loch, the damp rises in horizontal layers, coating logs and stumps and gate-posts with moist, green mosses and algae. In one field a whole tree fell, years ago. In this damp environment it has not died, but adapted to its horizontal status and continued to grow; a miniature forest of shoots, epiphytes and primitive plants along its horizontal trunk.

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The old river, the Leven, first to score a path through the glaciated landscape, tears out of the loch at the Sluice House, which straddles it, flat and low, and flows out to feed Fife, rural and industrial. Its lines are also straight and keenly defined; kingfishers dart horizontally beneath overhanging branches. Ripples march in military formation downriver.

Quiet, grey, the glacial loch behind you retreats into its bands of mist, its unseen wild occupants, its secrets and loveliness.

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