Bog Myrtle & Peat

Falcons nest on the drab, black face of a desperate, silent hill. It’s as far as you can get from tarmac and electricity in the south of Scotland; more than three hours’ walk and drive to the nearest tiny town. If you were to fall and snap your leg in the scree, the chances are you’d die. And if a snake rose to nip your calf, your eyes would swell in your head like cranberries. It’s a fine unwelcome place, and when the tourist board encourages people to “Visit D n G”, they’re talking about Rockliffe, Sandgreen or Kirkcudbright. They don’t mean the shimmering emptiness which falls for miles beneath the dripping cliffs and the overhang where two peregrines rasp and rip lesser birds to bits for the sake of their rowdy young. 

I was a mile away when the sound found me. I lay in the bitter grass to watch the birds come and go while the pipits creaked and the wind ran cool through pools of moss and water. The last of the season’s bogbean shone as lace in the evening light, and craneflies billowed in a low and catching tumble. Out in the middle distance, summer hinds watched and stamped their feet at me, holding their ears in an open y-shape like heads of the dark marsh thistle. I have sometimes found their calves out here, curled in a swirl of rust and grassy points. They’re dopy and still, but they’ll run like drunken men if you press them.

The sun had already passed over the shoulder of the hill, and the peregrine’s nest had fallen to indecipherable shade. But a glow of pink flowers shone where the chicks were huddled; the only splash of pink on the thousand-acre face of the cliff’s torn stone. I wondered if the seeds had been carried there in a previous year in the crop of a newly killed bird – or whether the constant scarting lime of the falcons had nourished the flower into extraordinary prominence. It’s just as likely that the nest was marked with pink flowers because it was built on a face so steep that not even the goats can graze it. However you explain the pink, the effect was a remarkable highlight in the face of granite shade and berry stems. 

This nest is easily found, even if the flowers weren’t a giveaway. The birds are loud and the bare-faced rock has nothing to hide. But if you only want to see a falcon’s nest, you can easily do away with the walk and the overbearing risk of loss or vanishment in the distant, tumbling scree. Make life simple for yourself. Just stand in the car park at Halford’s in Dumfries and look above traffic lights and the hiss of the bus-brakes to the steeple of St Michael’s Church. It’s somehow possible that peregrines are nesting there too.