TWO

THE COTT AGE IS A RUIN on the steep side of a quiet, south-facing fold in the Ochil Hills immediately to the north-east of Stirling. I met an old shepherd there once who told me it was lived in as recently as the 1950s. If that is true, its dereliction has been swift and is now almost complete. The roof is gone without trace. The front wall is all but gone, two broken stone doorposts and a windowsill (but not the window) give some sense of what it might have looked like. The back wall is only slightly less decrepit. The gables still stand, but every winter they crumble a little more. The cottage would have had one-and-a-half storeys, a sleeping platform in the roof.

It is utterly alone at the end of a mile-long meandering track that connects to a single-track road across the west edge of the Ochils. There is no other house at all anywhere within these hills. For company it has only the rowan tree a few yards from the front door which was planted purposefully there, for such is the tradition hereabouts: a rowan by the house wards off unwanted spirits and protects all who are welcome here. Part of the track has been re-made now to take hill-farm vehicles and to service the felling of a small plantation of conifers. But the last few hundred yards are still green and narrow and hairpinned. The track fords one hill burn and bridges another, the conduit of another time and symbolically redolent of the lives that were lived here.

I have known the place for forty years. I have walked the track uncounted times, and at least in the early years, I idly fantasised a life for myself in its re-built, re-roofed embrace with a tall column of smoke standing above it on still, frosted nights under a huge moon. In the security of that house in that fold in the hills I would become a child of nature again and write my books. But it occurs to me now that in order to realise that fantasy I would have had to evict the barn owls. Also, I would have had sheep for neighbours, and that wouldn’t have worked.

There were two chimneys. The one on the east gable is still in place, or at least enough of it remains to get the gist of it. Chimneys in such places (and especially once the rain and the frost and the wind have started to burst them apart) are perfect nest sites for birds that don’t like to build nests. This one was the home of barn owls for at least twenty years that I know of. Then for reasons that I don’t know of they disappeared and the neighbourhood kestrels moved from an old crow’s nest in the gully trees to the vacant chimney. Now I think the chimney may be too far gone to accommodate anything at all, but I will be happy to be proved wrong.

* * *

IN THOSE TWENTY YEARS I never found a more ideal man-made nest site for a barn owl in all my wanderings through my native land, and that remained the case until I came across its kindred spirit three years ago at the end of a long track far out on a quiet headland in the south of the Isle of Skye; kindred spirits united by isolation, by the inexorable ruination of the buildings (the Skye cottage still has some way to go, its roof is still in place but loosening), and by their colonising barn owls once human life had vanished and faded to the very outer edges of living memory.

Geographically, their situations could hardly be more dissimilar. The Ochils cottage, which is mysteriously called Jerah, is tucked into its hillside, sheltered from prevailing winds by the trees that throng the gully of a hoarse hill burn immediately to the west, hemmed in by steep, swooping, rounded hills on three sides, and as determinedly land-locked as any Scottish hillside can be. The Skye cottage, single-storey and low-slung, hunkers down on a bare clifftop wide open to ocean winds from the south-west, and the view from its back “garden” (a piece of land indistinguishable from the surrounding sheep-and-cattle-shorn terrain) stares at the Cuillin, at the mountainous, oceangoing profile of Rum, at sunsets such as you never dared to dream, and all of that was seared into the hearts and minds of hundreds of nineteenth century islanders whose fate was determined by the architects of the Highland Clearances. The barn owls quest restlessly among the waist-high ruins of the abandoned township of Suisnish, whose very name is shorthand for one of the Clearances’ blackest episodes. Seabirds scream in the airspace and golden eagles cruise low over the empty miles of the headland. The sea eagles have returned although the people never did, not here.

The cottage, the one with the roof, is later than the cleared ruins. Here too, in another echo of the Ochils cottage, barn owls moved in, and I met an old woman who lived in Torrin back on the road where the track sets out south along the shore of Loch Slapin to Suisnish and the sea. Her father was a postman, and she remembered him delivering mail to the cottage, the cottage which is now the address of barn owls. And I had known that place myself for about twenty-five years before the day I looked in at one windowless window frame and (inducing a shudder of recognition that reverberated all the way back to my Dundee childhood) a barn owl flew out of the nearby doorless doorway.

Both Suisnish and Jerah inhabit landscapes whose natural ecosystems have been largely obliterated by overgrazing. The still-belligerent free-range presence of sheep and cattle torments the ruins and defaces their melancholy inheritance. But that melancholy has surely been mitigated, dignified, beautified by the owls. It is a characteristic of what I think of as the forgiveness of nature. Ours is the only species so hell-bent on taking nature on, hell-bent on taming it, compromising it, obliterating it where it suits us. Yet whenever we turn our backs on some failed human endeavour of despoliation, from Gruinard Island to Chernobyl, nature begins to move in again almost at once, lays ground cover, plants trees, soothes broken stones with moss, summons swallows, dragonflies, orchids, wolves, barn owls.

Sometimes, in our more lucid moments, we take our cue from nature. Elsewhere on South Skye, in the Ochils, and dozens of other landscapes, native woodland is being restored, and with the trees come new growth, insects, flowers, birds, mammals. Among the countless beneficiaries of such lucidity, barn owls hunt the redefined woodland edge and the open land beyond and the rising or the setting sun turns their white plumage pale pink or pale gold, and something new begins on the land and in the air, or rather, something very old has been restored.

* * *

SUISNISH OFFERS rarefied barn owl watching. To be there at sunset and linger on into the gloaming (and if you have the tolerances for it, on into moon-or-star-light) is a rarefied event in itself, for sunset drapes itself over and around the Cuillin ranges of both Rum and Skye, infuses all the intervening tracts and inlets of the Atlantic Ocean, and ignites the very mountains so that they smoulder with echoes of their volcanic infancy. Add to these the passing and lingering tribes of seabirds, from gannets and greater black-backs to fulmars, auks and arctic terns and all their raised voices, overlay these with the soulful chants of eiders and grey seals and you have a box seat in a theatre of enchantment. Was that the wind in a rickle of stones or did you just gasp out loud?

As a stage set it is all so outrageously overdone that it overwhelms watching eyes for want of a focal point. But while my back was turned on the cottage, the hunting barn owl slipped out through the black and vacant doorway, flew round two sides of the cottage (the shadowed front, the ocean-lit south gable end), and burst with devastating slowness and silence into that tingling airspace like a sudden waft of bog-myrtle scent in a new rainfall. And now I had my focal point.

And now with binoculars raised I fed hungrily, a predator gorging on beauty, for the barn owl (which is unarguably beautiful in any light and in no light at all) wore electric copper on its back and upper wings, the back of its neck and upper head, deep pink on its heart-face, breast and underwings; and as it flew south-to-north and crossed the fieriest flare of the afterglow between me and the point where the sun finally ducked down behind Garsbheinn, the whole bird was a shadow rimmed in the most vivid shade of burning gold I have ever seen in forty years of staring out Skye sunsets, forty years in which I finally thought I had reason to believe that neither Skye sunsets nor barn owls for that matter had anything new to show me.

The owl flew on north and out of reach of fiery skies. The moment softly dissolved and the owl began to look like itself again. Yet even then, as I followed it in the glasses, pinnacle after pinnacle of the Skye Cuillin drifted through the background in a blurred but distinctly recognisable pageant of mountainous superstars. At last, the background ran out of mountains, and as if the owl had sensed the lessening of its impact on watcher eyes it wheeled south again, dipped towards the clifftop, and began sifting among the waist-high ruins of the cleared township, unsettling human ghosts and living mice and voles. Occasionally it stopped on the air, lowered long blond legs and feigned a stoop, or thudded softly into the grass or the nettles that thrive within forgetful, broken walls.

The owl’s strike rate is not high. In twenty unbroken minutes during which the owl was hardly out of my sight (and never for more than a few seconds at a time), it stooped six times and made no kills. Then it dropped below the level of the clifftop and vanished from my sight and I was left wondering how close to the waves it might descend from time to time and whether it did so at ease or in discomfort, and then I was wondering how conscious it might have been about the rarefied nature of the landscape where it had so recently carved out a territory, and what had persuaded it to come here in the first place and where it had come from, for Hebridean islands and the West Highland mainland, are hardly renowned as barn owl strongholds.

The moment of the owl’s descent towards the waves recalled a kestrel I once watched in Orkney. I saw it several times over a week and it hunted constantly along the very edge of the tide, hovering out over the waves to make the most of an offshore wind. I never did see what it was trying to catch. I wondered if mice and especially voles are given to rummaging for food in seaweed. Orkney has its own sub-species of field vole after all, so I suppose that simply by the very nature of Orkney they will turn up near the coast sooner or later. And if it happens there, why shouldn’t it happen along the coasts of a narrow projection of land like the Suisnish headland of south Skye? Still, it’s not every day I get to see a barn owl adrift over the wavetops.

I settled on the clifftop with my back to a crumbled old stone wall no higher than my head when I sat against it. My view was as raw and compelling as almost anything I have ever seen, and far, far beyond anything I might describe as simply beautiful, for there was a palpable suppressed power on the landscape that only seemed to strengthen as daylight yielded. The sky paled to almost white in the north-west, and everything that was rock in all its forms darkened to a troubling blue-black and seemed to advance en masse, as if it made a conscious animal effort to exaggerate its physical presence to every watching eye and listening ear, like a wolf pack when it howls.

My fondness for the gloaming is a companionable match for watching owls, likewise my capacity for sitting still and doing nothing at all whenever I think I may have contrived circumstances conducive to persuading nature to reveal something of itself. I said I do nothing at all; that’s not quite true, I tune in, concede some of my formal human-ness, become landscape. I reasoned the owl would be back. I sat still. I watched the mountains. I waited. It took longer than I thought it might, perhaps an hour, by which time the sky had given up the ghost on daylight and summoned the moon up and out of the ocean.

Ghostly analogies are everywhere in the literature of barn owls, and if that shows a lack of imagination among many generations of scribes it is an understandable lack, for mostly barn owls wear ghostly shades, mostly they are seen in the half-light or in no light at all, mostly they move with what most of us think of as a ghost’s gait, and mostly they startle us. Such traits are impressive enough in the hum-drum shadowlands of an old Lowland farmyard. But out here, out where the landscape of the dusk summons to its cause the aura of ocean-reflected, mountain-bestrewn moonlight, and what with my choice of seat within the ruins of a Clearances village happed in its own shroud of threnody, the owl when it finally materialised like a wad of blossom on a wind-crippled runt of a rowan tree not ten yards away dragged a gasp from me, which by the time it had escaped into the open air was most of the way to being a small shout of astonishment.

It was immediately obvious that owl and rowan tree were familiar collaborators, the chosen perch offering clear sightlines along several alleys between old stone walls, alleyways such as a mouse or a vole might use to navigate their ways through the island night. But the barn owl can also turn its head through 180 degrees so that it instantly homes in on the slightest noise behind its back. So for a small eternity the owl surveyed its portion of the island from the rowan, and only its head moved. When it flew at last it travelled no more than the length of the tree’s moonshadow before it fell, feet first, and as it fell it disappeared behind the far wall of the ruin where I sat, so that I saw nothing at all of what happened next until, with a wide banner of white wings and a scuffle of talons it announced itself on the topmost stone of the ruin’s broken gable. A vole hung from the beautiful heart-shaped face, held there by the odd curve of its broken back.

Whatever I had expected, it was not that. Some startled gesture of mine must have conveyed itself the length of the ruin to the owl, and it was gone almost before I had time to acknowledge that it had arrived. I would imagine that it was as startled as I was. Then just as suddenly the darkness seemed to fall like a dropped shroud. Then the moon climbed above the Cuillin ridge, a heaven-sent moon for a hunting owl and for the owl-watcher with a long walk home.

* * *

AND I REMEMBERED THEN that time after time during the barn owl years at Jerah in the Ochils, the owl’s first evening flight was from the nest in the chimney to the rowan tree at the front of the old cottage. This is an old relationship in Scotland, because the barn owl makes a habit of nesting in the abandoned nests of mankind, and many of the ruins are of homes and barns that belong to an era that insisted on planting a rowan just outside to ward off evil and to foster good fortune. Now, it is mostly the owl’s good fortune that a rowan stands just beyond where a door once stood.

Strange: the golden eagle, with no interest in ruins whatever, indeed a bird that will go to some lengths to avoid humankind and its works, almost always chooses a ledge with a nearby rowan for a nest site, and often weaves the greenery of rowans into the eyrie itself. No-one knows why, or ever will. Indeed, it is quite possible that the Gael acquired the habit from the eagle.

The Ochils are rounded, grassy hills the colour of straw in winter and green in the summer. Only the momentary panache of autumn and the midwinter snows relieve their monochrome garb, those and the few trees that thicken the cleughs and sykes* that carve up the hillsides and sometimes separate the hills from each other. But grassy hills are perfect for voles and therefore grassy hills with old stone ruins are perfect for barn owls. Short-eared owls like them too, and being ground nesters, don’t care about the ruins. But the lives and the breeding success of both owl tribes are critically dependent on the short-tailed field vole in particular, a species prone to population crashes every few years, with consequent abrupt breeding failure among owls. It is an ancient truth of nature: an abundance of predators is only possible if there is a superabundance of prey. (Thus, there is no such thing as “too many buzzards/sparrowhawks/ospreys/harriers/eagles”, the oft-heard cry of the landowning tribes and their hapless gun-toting staff.) The short-ear is the most persistently day-flying owl, and only twice in the forty years of my Ochils wanderings have I seen both short-ear and barn owls abroad on the same hillside at the same time, and that was a late afternoon of midwinter with the light fading fast.

The ruin of Jerah stands on a slope of a kind of amphitheatre in the hills whose only outlets are a steep and narrow glen in the south-east and a flattish and broader glen to the west with a small reservoir. The barn owls tended to take the way west on hunting flights, and I was accustomed to seeing them hunt the banks of the reservoir and the heathery moor at the mouth of the glen much more often than the steep-sided innards of the hills. The glen leads to more open slopes with bits of good woodland and long views out over the low-lying Carse of Stirling to the mountains beyond. These open slopes were the barn owls’ killing fields. But sometimes, if the wind was out of the north rather than the prevailing south-west, a hunting bird might edge round the bulk of the hills and up onto the higher ground of Sheriffmuir, and it was there that it would be most likely to cross the path of the short-ears.

Once, when the owls had chicks at Jerah, I saw one of the adults labouring homewards across the hillside to the north with prey, taking the high road home by the straightest route, but never did I see the outward flight take any direction but low and westward. It was a good nest to watch, from the drystone dyke about twenty yards from the house, eavesdropping on the bizarre vocabulary of snores, snorts, hisses and occasionally a thin terrier-like yap which the birds practise exclusively around the nest. But they hunt alone and in silence. It was also there that I worked out the mystery of the thing that looked like old Brillo pads, that mystery that had endured since childhood and the day I stepped out of bounds into forbidden territory.

All birds of prey cough up pellets of undigested material, usually just fur and bones. In the nesting season, barn owls cough them up where they plan to nest, and that is what the “nest” is made of, the undigested remnants of voles and mice. It is not so much a nest as a compact mat of insulation. When you think of the colossal nest-building labours of eagle or osprey or mute swan, for example, the barn owl is an object lesson in the first principles of architectural recycling.

But I was never that much of a sitter by nests, and I have grown more dissatisfied with the practice over the years. The notable exception has been a particularly wild mute swan nest site where the tendency of the occupants to break most of the field guide “rules” most of the time in the face of sustained natural adversity has enthralled me for more than thirty years. But then most of a mute swan’s life cycle is centred around the nest site and its immediate environs. You can’t follow swans into the hills. In general, though, what goes on out in the territory of birds that inhabit wild landscapes is much more compelling and more challenging for the watcher, especially if the end product of the watching is to write it down. So once the barn owl had flown from the chimney at Jerah and paused in the rowan (sometimes for moments, sometimes for minutes, once for half an hour while I sat a few yards away, motionless and trying not to breathe out loud) to test the wind or the nature of the evening or whatever else occupies an owl’s mind at such a moment, and once it had flown off on its mission, I would hurry through the gate in the dyke to watch and follow its path out into the world beyond.

Its route was unfailingly the same, at least in my limited experience of it. It would fly downhill and close to the trees that throng the gorge of the hill burn, until it reached the gap in the trees where the track crosses the burn by a crude but hefty bridge. There the owl would also cross the burn and there it would vanish, hidden by the trees. I followed with what haste I could muster and sometimes I would catch sight of it again beyond the bridge, far out over the moor or cruising the bottom of the hillsides, and then I would stalk it for as long as the owl and the light permitted.

I longed to meet it on the bridge, just once, to see it swerve into the narrow gap in the trees head-on and drift low above the bridge and beneath the dark canopy of the trees, an intensely white anomaly moving towards me through such a gathering of shadows, then out into the open and the last rays of sunset striking notes of pale pink or pale yellow on its face and breast and underwings. But it never happened that way, and always it left me far behind, diminishing against the western sky.

Now, all that has changed is the degree of decrepitude in the chimney. All the other reasons of why this corner of the Ochils is good for barn owls are still in place. So every May I walk the track out to the ruin of Jerah to see if they have returned. As yet they have not, and every year there is a little less chimney to work with. But there are still big trees by the burn and from time to time winter storms splinter and deform one or two of these, and as long as there are owls nearby to explore the new possibilities of broken-open tree trunks, there is the possibility of return.

* Cleugh – the steep-sided gorge of a burn;
Syke – a wet hollow crossed by a burn.