A walk to Heldale.

With our unseasonable dry spell continuing, most of the past week was spent in other gardens. Like many islanders, when it comes to earning a crust, we wear more than one hat. One day you’re selling plants, another day antiques online, the next might be gardening or dry-stone walling. This week, for me, it was gardening, cutting and planting a double screen of grey willow for a new garden a few miles away. We don’t go mad, working part time, happy to work to live rather than live to work, enough to keep the wolf from the door. With willows planted, on Friday, while Jacqui prepped some plants for sale, I took myself off on a favourite walk, to the valley of Heldale. Walk half a mile along the road and then follow a stone track up into the moors. At first, as you leave the road, there’s a flat landscape of mixed habitats, Grasses and Heathers and wet spot Rushes. It’s a home to breeding Greylags (pictured top) and Curlews. At this time of year, the male Curlews rise over the ground like Larks, soaring upwards before falling leaf-like back to earth, marking their territories with a haunting bubbling call.

As the track climbs higher, heather wins out. To your left though there’s a shallow valley, a place where native willow scrub thrives. The willows are rarely more than head high, chastened by the winds. They never leave the valleys, there’s an invisible growth line that’s never crossed. Tucked among them are dozens of bird sown rowan, silver barked and leafless, buds just starting to thicken.

After a mile and a half or so, you rise a crest on the track and a natural reservoir, Heldale water, comes into view. A wide ribbon of silver in a landscape of browns and greys. Supplier of potable water to this end of the island. Out on the water, too distant to photograph, were the black shapes of a dozen Bonxies, Great Skuas, newly arrived from a winter in Spain or Africa.

To the North-west of Heldale there’s Bakingstone hill. I wanted to see Eagles and Mountain hares and close to home there’s no better spot. I cut up from the reservoir, following a fence line that had long lost its purpose, bleached stabs and rusted wire, only useful now to the Meadow pipits who keep a lookout from the post tops. It’s not much of a climb, but despite our dry spell the ground is boggy and soft, making the going far harder than it should be.

As expected, Mountain hares were seen in numbers, most are wary, scutting away at the first sight of man. One though sat up on hind legs and watched as I passed by, if a hare can look wise, he or she did. As with all the other hares seen that day, he or she wore a piebald coat, the Spring moult in progress, half winter white, half summer brown.

At this time of year  Emperor moths are seen. As I climbed higher I saw males on the wing, brightly coloured fast fliers that at a distance are easily mistaken for butterflies. The females are larger and paler, a bluish-grey, and unlike the males they fly only at night. Tucked down amongst the heathers they are almost impossible to spot, given away only by amorous males who are drawn to the females by pheromones. Follow the male and you’ll find the female. Eggs are laid in April and May and the caterpillars, after a summer of munching on heather, will spin a silk cocoon and overwinter close to the ground, they’re the UK’s only native silk moth.

At the top of Bakingstone the ground plateaus and dries out, yet to green up heathers are crunchy underfoot. Here and there are pools of bright water, homes to whirligig beetles that constantly skate and circle. A shimmer of silver upon the skies reflection. To the west there’s the glitter of a sunlit sea. To the North, nothing but open moor, low hills, shallow valleys and countless lochans. The silence, on a still day, is deafening.

At the end of Bakingstone there’s a rock, dropped by a passing glacier, that’s big enough to show up on an OS map. A good place to stop and eat a chocolate bar before setting off home. The rock is covered in a mini forest of brittle lichens, silver greys and soft yellows, each of them decades or perhaps centuries old.

To sit on the stone and crush the lichens would be an act of vandalism, so I sat on my coat on the heathers and realised, after a while, that I was being watched. The watcher given away by a bright eye and a pair of long furry ears.

I went home via the waters shore. From the ridge a steep, and careful, foot sideways descent that occasionally needs the reassurance of grabbed handfuls of heather. As the ground levelled out more hares sprung from their forms, none of them pausing, each showing a clean set of heels. To the West, way up high, soaring on the updrafts, I saw three broad winged specks, white tailed eagles, the hares nemesis, a pair and a single bird.

In addition to the hares and eagles, I’d hoped to see Hen harriers and Red grouse. For the former a sighting is pretty much a given here, at home they’re a bird seen almost daily, either hunting the shore or quartering the moor beyond the back garden. Red grouse are here but are much more often heard rather than seen. As luck would have it the Harriers were absent that day but a few dozen yards from the track that would take me home, a pair of Grouse flushed from under my feet. A glimpse of a brief few seconds, all sunlit red and ginger-black, curling away at fence post height.