August the 4th.

The last days of July brought mostly settled weather. The odd spell of rain but generally dry and bright with light winds and clear skies.

In the garden, the warmth brought Crocosmia lucifer into flower. A traffic light red back of a border plant that travelled with us on the journey from Yorkshire. We grow around eight or nine varieties of crocosmia, in various shades of yellows, oranges and reds. Lucifer is a favourite and is always the first to flower. A good late summer perennial for this island garden, happy in dry or damp, in both sun or part shade. 

Another plant that also marks the coming of August is the Day Lily, hemerocallis. They live up to their name, each bloom literally lasting a day. As fast as one flower fades though another takes its place, each stem carries multiple buds, a mini production line of oranges and reds.

In the meadow, tucked low amongst the grasses, soft blue pincushion heads of Devils Bit Scabious are starting to appear. The plant gets its name from its truncated root, which was, according to folklore, bitten off by the Devil.  After the meadow was cleared a single plant appeared, to boost numbers we tried, and failed, to grow more of it from seed. We shouldn’t have bothered, three years on, from that single plant there are now dozens of them, happily self seeding their way across the ground. A plant that we did introduce from seed was Lesser Knapweed, found locally but absent from the meadow. Unlike the devils bit they’re one of the easiest wildflowers to grow, show them compost and they’ll germinate. We’ve planted hundreds of plugs of them over the last couple of years and notice that now, around the oldest of them, the turf is dotted with self sown seedlings.

As some plants come into flower others are already fading to seed. In the meadow the dandelion like seed heads of cats ear are starting to form. For us they’re the most successful of the grassland plants. They first appeared along the fields southern edge, a line of bright yellow springing up where decades old grass and thatch had been cleared to allow the repair of a boundary fence. Their appearance gave weight to our hope that, beneath the fields thick coat of thatch, a meadow was lurking, waiting for warmth and light. Now they carpet almost the whole of the meadow. Only absent in the wettest of spots, the places where buttercups take over the task of turning the land from green to gold.

Meadow Brown butterflies are on the wing. As each year passes we see them more and more, both in the meadow and within the garden. Of the ten species of butterfly that are usually seen in Orkney, so far we’ve managed to record eight of them. Only the extremely rare for this this far North, Large Heath and Dark Green Fritillary,  have so far eluded us.

On the low cliff, where the meadow falls steeply to the shore, a few pairs of Fulmars nest. It’s not really ideal for them, the face of the cliff is mostly covered with a vertical green wall of blackberry and wild rose but here and there, wherever space allows a clear landing and take off, a scrape will be made and a single egg will be laid. Some of the nests are barely head high but at low tide, looking back at the cliff with a long lens on the camera, the chicks can be safely photographed without disturbance. Despite being many weeks old they have yet to feather up. They sit motionless, like downy Buddha’s, patiently waiting for their parents to return from a fishing expedition. After hatching it’s around seventy days before the chick leaves the nest, from an egg laid in May, it’s late summer before they spread their wings. If lucky, they’ll live for thirty or forty years. It’s hard to imagine that those fluffy balls of down will soon be mastering up-draughts and thermals and wandering the winter seas.

The shore below the cliff is literally a tumble of stone and rock, there’s no beach except at the very lowest of tides. It’s home to a bob of around twenty or so harbour seals. They pup in June and during that time we leave them be for a few weeks, avoiding walking on the shore. By this time of year, with the pups well grown, a count can be made of how successful they’ve been. This afternoon, after photographing the Fulmar chicks, I counted seventeen adults and at least eight pups, all hauled out on the wrack covered rocks. Keeping a wary eye on me and deciding if they could be bothered to slip back into the sea. In the end they couldn’t be bothered, staying put, craning their necks to watch me pass.

Before the days of roll-on, roll-off ferries and household  refuse collections, the shore, for houses close to it, was seen as a  handy place to get rid of household waste. The tide takes no prisoners, bottles and pots dumped over the cliff by barrow or cart would soon be reduced to sea smoothed fragments of stoneware and glass. Occasionally though a stoneware bottle will be found intact, somehow surviving a century or more of being rolled back and forth by the tides. Broken china also went into the sea, there are many hundreds of fragments of spongeware and willow pattern, pieces of dropped plates and broken cups.

Rarer, and naturally occurring, are pieces of Malachite. An Ore of copper that is sometimes cut and polished for the jewellery trade. In colour it has the same verdigris as aged copper pipe and is often found near the mouths of burns, perhaps swept down from the surrounding hills by rainwater rushing from moor to shore. The ore only occurs here in small quantities and in the distant past there have been unsuccessful attempts to mine it, at Wha Taing on the Orkney mainland, and also, in the sixteenth century, on the island of Rousay.