Much of the time the eagle is perched on the shore, or more often at the top of the larch tree. Each time he returns to his perch he approaches the tree from very low down, at the last minute swooping up to the top of the tree, wings labouring, hauling him up the last few feet. He makes several long-distance glides from the tree low across the water, as if he has spotted something just below the surface from a long way out. Most of these flights are aborted and he heads straight back to his perch. Occasionally he lands back on the tree facing the wrong way and has to hop himself around to face the water. When he does this the branch he is sitting on shakes beneath him. Before he settles into his perch he pulls his tail up behind him and it flashes white, once, twice across the sound towards me.
On one occasion he catches something close to the shore, though he is too far away for me to see what it is. Perched on the shore he is camouflaged, his brown body blending into the wrack line of rusty kelp, his pale grey head becoming just another rock. It is hard to keep track of him when he is on the shore like this. I think I have him, refocus the binoculars, then see that all the time I have been staring at a rock … It is at times like this that he is his Gaelic name, Iolaire chladaich (the shore eagle).
Sometimes a solitary gull finds the eagle at his perch and there follows an endless round of mobbing. If the gull comes too close (which it doesn’t often) the eagle raises his bill towards the gull, extends his long neck to jab it away. But the gull does not relent. It’s as if it is locked into a flight path, swooping down at the eagle, persistently, rhythmically, loop after loop, in a shallow curve above the eagle’s head.
VI
Goshawk
Scotland–England Border
Here is MacGillivray approaching the Border, walking into autumn through Kirkcudbrightshire, hair a little sun-bleached, shoulders calloused from his knapsack’s weight. Muddy splash marks rise up his coat, a crescent pattern to the mud spots like an offshore reef.
It is almost a month now since MacGillivray left Aberdeen on his higgledy walk to London and he cannot put off leaving Scotland any longer. I have (can I say this?) grown envious of his feet, he never seems to complain about them. But are they really immune to all that pummelling: Aberdeen to Fort William, 161 miles; Fort William to Glasgow, 134 miles …? Seldom more than two meals a day, though he sometimes sounds as if he would like to live off less:
Bread and water will do very well for the greater part of my journey, for many a better man has lived a longer period than will be allotted to it, on worse fare …
But his poor feet, surely they are beginning to ache? In Morvern my feet turned a strange crinkled yellow, the skin softened like margarine (how I wished I had followed MacGillivray’s recipe and bathed them in whisky and liniment of soap …). The only time I hear MacGillivray grumble is when he is bitten by bed bugs in Glasgow. He burns up in a fever, can barely open his left eye, and a tumour swells on his cheek to the size of a hen’s egg. How he wishes he could have exchanged that bed in Glasgow for a couch of grass on the side of Cairngorm … And now he is so wary of the blighters he sniffs the air of every inn for the bugs’ peculiar coriander scent, combs his mangy rooms with a pin, prising the bugs from their daylight hiding places, the seams and chinks of bedposts, the gaps beneath the skirting board, till his pin holds its own length in wriggling bugs, like a keeper’s gibbet or the shrike’s thorn.
I managed little better with bugs in Morvern, beating my own world record for parasitic ticks, each night lying in the tent, inspecting my skin by torchlight, extracting the ticks with tweezers one by one. Once, in desperation, I tried smoking a pipe to ward off midges, but smoking it was eye-watering misery: I could not get any draw on the tobacco and kept having to relight it, coax and suck it back into life like a damp bonfire. MacGillivray recommended decocting tobacco for the treatment of bed bugs. Either tobacco, or Irish lime sprinkled across the floor. Once, staying at a London inn, he was so tormented by bugs biting his face, neck, arms, back and legs, even the crown of his head, that he resorted to using candle tallow to rub against his skin where he had been bitten.
Glasgow to Portpatrick, 99 miles; Portpatrick to the Border, 107. Expenditures: half the ten pounds he set out with from Aberdeen, the remaining five tucked in a small pocket in the inner side of his flannel vest, though he is certain he won’t need all of it. London from the Border at a steady trot, twenty shillings should cover it. Bread and water (repeat the mantra!): better men have lived on worse.
Five hundred and one miles clocked since he left Aberdeen a month ago. Bearing up pretty well, the swelling from the bug bites going down, a touch of homesickness now and then (he had it in Fort William when he came into the orbit of the Isles). But doing well, considering: on budget, feet enviably robust, approaching the Border, heading south.
Early morning above the forest, a smoky winter light. The wind starting up, stirring rooks and jackdaws into plumes of soot. A sparrowhawk, skimming the canopy, rises to meet a woodpigeon. No intent to the flight, it just goes up to have a look. The pigeon flinches and the hawk dives back towards the trees. Then a pair of ravens are up, clearing their throats, a glint of brightness, like polished mahogany, in their thick beaks. The ravens sound different here, their voices dampened by the trees. Nothing like the raven in the Outer Hebrides, jostling with the golden eagles, its call cleaned and sharpened by the cliffs, carried down the glen by loch and gneiss.
Everything about this morning feels slow and hushed. The muted ravens, the mushy light, even the sparrowhawk’s pigeon-jink had none of the hawk’s usual quick-fire dash. There are mornings like this when the forest feels cold-blooded and everything in it seems to take an age to limber up.
Then crows are crossing the forest in twos and threes, ambling, tugging at each other. A buzzard circling to the right of me. A goshawk displaying a long way off. The goshawk is too far out and I cannot get any feel for the bird, any purchase on it. Other than I notice it is roughly the same size as the buzzard, though not as dark and not as compact, not as rounded in its shape. Occasionally I pick up flashes of white showing on the goshawk’s plumage. The buzzard is circling, rising through figures of eight. The goshawk is flying slowly a few feet above the treetops. A slight, sudden rise as if the hawk meets an updraught and just as quickly it is dropping out of the rise and landing on a tall pine tree.
Through my binoculars I flick between the perched goshawk and a felled area of the forest about a mile away. The clearing saddles a ridge, a whale’s back rising above the shallow valley. I keep drawing back to the clearing, studying it, thinking … if I head up there, that would be a good place to be, that would be a good place to watch for goshawks. Up there, I might get closer to the birds as they find the lift of breeze above the ridge. So I take a compass bearing, drop down into the forest, and make towards the clearing.
Saturday 2 October, 1819. Three miles from Newton Stewart, MacGillivray comes across an outlier from the south, a specimen of trailing tormentil, on the edge of its range, huddled beneath a hedge. He has never seen the plant before in the north and it dawns on him that he is running out of Scotland. He is aware too of how, daily, the light is leaving the land, in the jaundiced grass out on the heath, in the withered bracken. Very few plants are in flower now and sometimes it feels, as MacGillivray approaches the Border, that he is walking in step with autumn as it moves through the land from north to south, snuffing out each flower in turn along his route. He passes through a field of wild carrot, scarlet pimpernel and corn woundwort and picks some of the carrots to crunch as he walks. When he brings the carrot roots up to his mouth it looks, for a moment, as if he has grown a pale yellow beak like the juvenile choughs he saw feeding amongst cattle dung on Barra.
His pockets are stuffed with all the specimens of plants he has gleaned along the way, all his curious digressions. There hasn’t been time to press them all and so many plants are lodged in the nooks and crannies of his clothing it looks like they are sprouting from him. The man on horseback
MacGillivray passed in the dusk outside Castle Douglas must have thought he had been overtaken by a scarecrow as he watched the figure stumbling ahead of him, wisps of foliage trailing from his cuffs. He is still uncertain how to answer people who stop to ask him about the plants. On one occasion, walking along with a bunch of cuttings in his hand, a woman stopped and peered at him:
– Is that yerbs?
– Yes.
– Ow! That’s rushes.
– Yes, it is a kind of rush (It was Hard Rush).
– Fat’s this?
– I don’t know the English name of it.
– Are you gaun ti’ drink affin’t?
– No I don’t intend to put it to any medical use …
MacGillivray wrote that he left Scotland on his walk to London without regret, that Scotland was too wide a word for him, that it was the Isles and mountains that really claimed him. But I wonder, did he not feel less sure-footed as he stepped from Dumfriesshire into Cumberland, did that specimen of trailing tormentil not remind him that much of what lay ahead was unfamiliar to him? And besides, once MacGillivray crossed into England he pelted through it at such a rate, head down, a beeline for London, none of the meandering diversions that Scotland steered in him.
All that walking in circles around the Morvern peninsula, I needed to straighten out. So, when I reached the border between Scotland and England, I decided to follow it and walk along a stretch of its line in the deep goshawk forests above Kielder. I spent the days following broken dykes and firebreaks through the trees, criss-crossing burns and cleughs and sikes. Each firebreak in the forest felt like an avenue for goshawks, every tree along every ride and clearing I scanned for that heart-thumping goshawk meeting. For several days I hesitated over the Border like this, dipping my toes in and out of England. Sometimes I found myself zigzagging, leapfrogging back and forth across the line for mile after mile. In the evening returning to my tent pitched on the boundary, my head dreaming in Scotland, my legs hanging over the Border, pointing south.
Waking on the hillside, and being woken by a sound like a stream gurgling beneath me: red grouse, starting up the day, calling through the heather, their calls burbling under my ear. Fog this morning and the forest has stepped off into whiteness. I go in search of the trees, walking across sphagnum humps, tussocky reed grass, the fog condensing on the sharp reed blades and spiders’ webs. In a boggy alley on the side of the fell I find a bloom of grouse feathers, neatly plucked, lying in the heather. I search for the carcass but find nothing. Goshawks are fastidious about preparing their prey, can spend over an hour plucking a pigeon, feathers growing in a ring around the hawk as it works. Afterwards the hawk can feed for an hour, sometimes two. The pile of grouse feathers looked like raptor’s work, too neat for a fox.
I fumble through the mist and finally reach the trees. Along the forest’s rim I pass through different belts of roe-deer droppings, some fresh from the night before, wet, shiny black, others much older-looking, parched and crumbling. Inside the trees and the forest is dripping with fog-dew. It is dark among the pines with a sense of heavier darkness just out of reach. Beyond the trees there is a brightness inside the mist which seeps a little way into the trees then quickly dissolves in the gloom. Rackways, where thinnings have been removed, wander into the forest then peter out. Deer paths blend into the rackways then veer away again like branch lines or capillaries. I follow one deer track deeper into the forest. Something is glowing up ahead through the trees and I wind towards it like a moth. It is some sort of relic of the Border line, a strange arrangement of standing stones and cairns, gnomish monuments, draped in a moleskin of green lichen that glows almost fluorescent amongst the pines.
Planting began at Kielder in 1926 and it soon became the largest man-made forest in the country. Sitka and Norway spruce, the Sitka darker, bluer. Scots pine and Lodgepole pine, a redness, like lava, in the fissures of the old Scots pine bark. Bright clumps of larches amongst the pines. Few native trees remain: sallow willow in the valleys, birch in the narrow cleughs, alders along the river banks and on the river’s islands of silt.
Wind can havoc a plantation like this. Shallow roots on wet, clay-like soil made the trees especially vulnerable. Early thinning in the forest proved disastrous, letting the winds in to roam through the blocks of trees, yanking at their weak roots, toppling the pines like dominoes. You see the same phenomenon – the same vulnerability – in goshawk feathers. If a hawk becomes stressed through lack of food or, as is sometimes the case in birds trained for falconry, through psychological stress, the bird’s growing feathers record the period of distress as a pale line, a band of weakness across the vane. These lines are known as ‘fret marks’, records of distress, as when a tree logs a period of drought-stress through a narrowing of its growth rings. Feathers with stress marks are vulnerable to breaking along these weakened points. As with the thinning of the forestry plantations, once one feather breaks there is less support for the remaining weakened feathers and these can swiftly follow suit, impeding the hawk’s survival, its ability to fly and hunt effectively.
I keep stumbling across things buried beneath the forest: steadings, sheep fanks, stells … There is a sense of a busy landscape being drowned under the trees as rapidly as Culbin was smothered by the sandstorm. A few miles below me is the great reservoir of Kielder Water and under its waters sleep all the drowned hill farms of the Upper Tyne.
Every ten years they partly drain the reservoir at Kielder for maintenance. I imagined a dripping world of sunken boats, field boundaries, cavernous farmhouses slowly revealing themselves as the waters dropped. I envisaged folk going down to the shore to gaze at this lost world. And I was sure this is what happened; I had spoken to someone in the village who told me about a road across the bottom of the reservoir, about going to salvage his boat that had sunk. I had read a little about the community of the Upper North Tyne before the valley was flooded, read some of the moving evidence the community had put forward in objection to the reservoir scheme:
We cannot appreciate why we should be compelled to sacrifice our homes and the whole community spirit of the Upper North Tyne, when equal quantities of water could be obtained from reservoir sites built in areas where there would not be one fraction of the disturbance likely to be caused in this area …
But the reality is there is no lost world beneath the reservoir. Nothing is revealed when they start to drain it, nor is it drained completely. Every stone of every farmhouse, every tree trunk, was removed when the reservoir was constructed in the 1970s. What was there before the valley flooded – the community of hill farms – was entirely erased. I had just assumed that the remnants of that community would still be there beneath the reservoir. It took a call to the Northumbrian Water Authority to set me right. They told me about the careful disbandment of the farms and houses, the way every tree was uprooted to avoid them later floating to the surface. I wanted to believe that there were still relics down there, signs of what had been drowned in the valley, that the tops of buildings might briefly emerge during a drought, just as they poked up through the shifting sands of Culbin. Instead, every decade, when the waters are lowered, all that is revealed is a vast absence.
Mid-morning and the fog is beginning to peel. Where are you, goshawk? What am I searching for? A chimera, a rumour? A space inside a fir tree where light seeps through, a patch of silvery lichen across a branch … There are so many things to deceive and delude you when you are searching for – aching to see – the birds. How many buzzards I must have willed into goshawks! How many times I have tried to conjure a hawk out of absence. Even the discarded beer cans I spotted from a distance lying beside the Bells Burn, just over the Scottish side of the Border, were grey and hawk-shaped enough to briefly glint in my imagination, until I was close enough to tell them for what they were and could see how their tin had weathered to a murky silver.
Behind the beer cans, on the opposite bank of the burn, stood a large ring of lichen-crusted stone: a ‘stel
l’, a circular walled sheep enclosure, 5 to 5½ feet tall, 30 feet in diameter, a purpose-built snow shelter where flocks could seek refuge from the drifts. I rested inside it for a while, brewed tea, cleaned the glass on my binoculars. The stell was a beautiful construction, remarkably intact. Its wall had been built (as all the walls along the Border are) with two walls leaning towards each other, the gap between them stacked with the chatter of smaller stones, both walls then bound together with longer thruft stones that reach through the chatter like ribs. Built, as well, to be flexible, to bend and sag as the soft ground gives way beneath the wall’s weight.
Tree pipits are squabbling amongst the timber brash beside the stell, their sandstone breasts streaked with black rain. The birds bounce from stump to stump like charged electrons. They drop so rapidly to the ground, it’s as if they are sucked there through a vacuum. Their descent to the safety of the tangled brash is so sudden it is not really a descent at all, more like a vanishing act.
I cross the valley floor and start to climb through the trees towards the ridge. Buzzards are up hunting the valley. When I reach the top of the ridge I turn west and follow it till I reach the felled clearing. Acres of forest open up beneath me. A crow is calling from its perch on a thin bark-stripped pine trunk. I see it watching me as I enter the clearing and hide myself amongst the brash and stumps.
The next few hours are a dizzying experience. After days spent looking for goshawks and finding only their absence, the birds are suddenly here and all around me. First, there are the usual outriders, buzzard and raven. Two ravens, displaying, tumbling, corkscrewing above the ridge. Three buzzards, calling – also displaying – above my head, twisting, diving, rushing down towards the forest. Then, lower than the buzzards, 30 feet to my right, flying just above the tops of the clearing’s remnant trees, a goshawk’s blue-grey back. The hawk swings over and hangs huge above me so that I nearly fall over backwards straining my neck to watch it. I can see the contour patterns on its chest, the darker band of feathers round its eye, the white stripe along its eyebrow.
Raptors Page 11