she shoots away and hies to another field; but she has not proceeded far when she spies a frog by the edge of a small pool, and, instantly descending, thrusts her sharp talons through its sides. It is soon devoured, and in the mean time the male comes up. Again they fly off together; and were you to watch their progress, you would see them traverse a large space of ground, wheeling, gliding, and flapping, in the same manner, until at length, having obtained a supply of savoury food for their young, they would fly off with it.
Attentive, accurate, warm and intimate, you cannot help but feel MacGillivray’s delight at being out there amongst the birds. The degree of observation: the way he records the hen harrier’s flight, the detail in the landscape, the description of the moorland flowers and moorland birds. It felt to me like the work of an exceptional field naturalist; the writer seemed to notice everything. And I wanted to read more, had to read more. Felt a kinship there, at least in the way MacGillivray responded to the birds. He caught the hen harrier’s beauty in his careful, graceful writing.
I walk through the middle of the day across the bog. Anything that breaks the horizon draws you towards it. The house is so far out on the flow it is like a boat set adrift. Not long abandoned, the building sagging, tipping into the bog. A portion of the corrugated-iron roof torn back, exposing timber cross-beams. Rock doves blurt out of the attic. Outside the house there is a bathtub turned upside down; four stumpy iron legs sticking upright, like a dead pig. In one of the rooms: a metal bed frame, a mattress patterned with mildew, blue ceramic tiles decorating the fireplace. A dead hind in the doorway, the stench of it everywhere. Deer droppings piled against the walls as if someone had swept them there.
MacGillivray often slept in places like this on his long walk to London. One night, on the outskirts of Lancaster, tired and wet, he stumbled upon a large, misshapen house in the dark. He went inside and groped his way around till he had made a complete circuit of the rooms. There was no loft, not even a culm of straw to bed down in, but earlier he had tried to sleep under a hedge and the house, despite its damp clay floor, was preferable. So he slept behind the door in wet feet with a handkerchief tied around his head, woke to a mild midnight to peep at the moon and walk up and down the floor a bit. Then slept again with his head on his knapsack to wake at dawn and walk down to the river to wash his face.
But that restless night on the outskirts of Lancaster comes much later. It is only five days since MacGillivray set out from Aberdeen and he is still in Aberdeenshire, crossing the Cairngorms on route from Braemar to Kingussie. He spends the night of Sunday 12 September high in the mountains in a palaver of sleeplessness and shivering. Supper is a quarter of a barley cake and a few crumbs of cheese. After which he does his best to make a shelter out of stones and grass and heath, then settles the knapsack and some heather over his feet, to try to keep the cold at bay.
He wakes at sunrise and resumes his climb into the mountains. It is slow going and he pauses often to rest; his muscles, after so little food, shiver with fatigue. At the source of the Dee he pauses to drink a glassful of its cold, blissful water. Up on the plateau he finds moss campion and dwarf willow; in the steep grey corries: dog’s violet, smooth heath bedstraw, alpine lady’s mantle.
During my time in Caithness and Sutherland I heard rumours of merlins. People were generous with their knowledge, pointing places out to me on my map. Somebody’s faint memory of a nest site was enough to set me trekking far out across the bog. One afternoon I walked out to a distant mountain that rose sheer out of the flow. I had been told that a corrie high on the mountain’s north face was a traditional nesting site for merlins. I walked there through a land creased with water, through dense clusters of dubh lochans, the hundreds of small lakes that form beautiful patterns across the surface of the bog. In some places the lochans are packed so tightly you can drift through their mazy streets for hours with no sense of where you might emerge. Most of the pools are shallow, two or three feet deep, though occasionally one would sink its depth into blackness. Water horsetail grew in some of the shallower pools, bell heather and cotton sedge along the banks. Around the edge of the pools were great mounds of sphagnum moss built up like ant hills. I pushed my arm into one of them, losing it up to my shoulder in the moss’s cool dampness, sphagnum tentacles crawling over my skin. Some of these mounds had been perched on by birds, wisps of down feather left behind, the imprint of the bird’s weight on the soft moss.
Hours I spent out there on the bog, and so many distractions on the way to the mountain, so much water to weave around. At one point, I gave up and slithered otter-like between the lochans, swirling up clouds of peat particles when I dived into the pools. And somewhere out on the flow a great boulder – just as the abandoned house had done – drew me towards it. A huge lump of rock, 20 feet high, jettisoned by the retreating ice. There was a solitary mountain ash growing up through a crack in the rock like a ship’s mast. I clambered up the boulder and found, on the slab’s flat top, a plate of bones. I had discovered an eagle’s plucking perch, bones strewn everywhere, on the slab and in the heather around the base of the boulder. Amongst the bones there was a red deer’s hoof, its ankle still clothed in grey hide.
It was mid-afternoon by the time I reached the mountain and climbed up to the corrie. I sat down with my back against a rock, listened and waited for the merlins. A corrie is the mountain’s cupped ear. It is a contained space away from the rushing noise of the tops, an amphitheatre of silence. You walk into it and enter an enclosed stillness where everything is suddenly closer, amplified, the raven’s croaking echo, the golden plover’s whistle. I was glad to be out of the wind. I thought, if merlins were here, their calls would sound cleaner, sharper, and hopefully I could track them more easily by listening out for the birds. But, something about the quiet stillness of the corrie, the release from the rushing wind out on the flow … when I sat down beside the rock, I fell asleep and when I woke the corrie had grown cooler, thicker with shadow.
Later I heard another rumour, a sure bet this time, a place where merlins nested year after year. The site was a deep cut through the flow where a burn wound down towards the river. I walked there across the glittering bog, light finding and lifting pools into pools of light. Near the burn I found signs of merlins everywhere: chalk-marked boulders – perches, lookout posts – patterned white by the birds’ excretions.
There are some neighbourhoods of the moor that draw merlins to them time and again. It is difficult to identify what it is about a location that has so much appeal, but availability of prey and suitable nesting sites play a crucial role in the land’s capacity to draw in raptors. In his pioneering study of merlins in the Yorkshire Dales published in 1921, William Rowan observed nineteen different pairs of merlins return to the same patch of heather every year for nineteen years. Each spring there was always a new influx of birds because each year, without fail, both the male and female merlin were killed by gamekeepers on their breeding ground and their eggs destroyed.
It was enough for keepers to set their traps on top of a merlin’s favourite lookout boulder. No need to even camouflage the trap: the merlin’s fidelity to certain perches always outweighed the bird’s mistrust of the sharp jaws of a trap. Rowan used to plead – even tried to bribe – the keepers to spare the merlins. He had watched grouse quietly foraging bilberry leaves right in front of the adult merlins at their nest, so he knew that merlins posed no threat to grouse. But a few days before the grouse season opened the keeper would go out early with his gun and clear the moor of hawks of every shape and size. And every year another sacrificial pair of merlins arrived to plug the gap. Rowan wondered where they came from, this surplus tap of merlins, replenishing the same patch of moor year after year. What was it about that clump of heather on the side of the fell that had such a pull on the birds? Rowan identified a few characteristics of the place, of merlin nests in general: a bank of deep, old heather; an expansive view from the nest site of the surrounding moorland; a number of lookout boulders above the nest …
But it is hard to see the land as the birds must see it, to feel a place as they must do. I am always looking for clues in the landscape, trying to anticipate the birds from the feel of a place. The ornithologist Ian Newton observed that, when he was studying sparrowhawks in South West Scotland, he could glance inside a wood and tell straight away if its internal landscape was conducive for sparrowhawks. Eventually, after you have spent time amongst the birds, once you have settled into their landscapes, you can walk through a wood or