Halkirk, Tormsdale. The Norse language here flowing down from Orkney and spreading up the course of the river. Flagstone dykes marking field boundaries. Sheep, bright as stars against the pine-dark grass, disturbed by the train, cantering away like brushed snow. Then the train is crossing an unmarked border, a linguistic watershed, the last Norse outpost before the Gaelic hinterland of the bog, a ruined farmstead with a Norse name, Tormsdale, peered down on by low hills, each one attended to by its Gaelic, Bad á Cheò, Beinn Chàiteag, Cnoc Bad na Caorach. The last stop, as far as the Norse settlers would go. Because if you didn’t stop here you would wander for days adrift on the bog before you sank, exhausted, into the marshy flói.
‘Bog bursts’, ‘quaking ground’, ‘sink holes’ … I am trying to pay heed to the dramatic vernacular of the bog, checking my boots are well proofed, my gaiters are a good fit. I must remember to check and recheck compass bearings against the map, must remember to tread carefully over this landscape. Because once, I nearly lost my brother in a peat bog.
Another family holiday, another peaty, midge-infested destination. This time, the Ardnamurchan peninsula, Scotland’s gangplank, the jump off to America. My brother was six or thereabouts and we had been to the village shop, where he had bought a toy car. More than a car, it was a six-wheeled, off-road thing. Orange plastic like a street lamp’s sodium glare, round white stickers for headlights, a purple siren on the roof. My brother took it everywhere. And lucky for all of us he had the car with him on a walk up the hill one afternoon, holding the toy out in front of him, chatting to it, running through some imagined commentary, when he dropped, as if down a hole, into what looked like nothing more than just a puddle. The bog had got him. And he was struggling, sinking into the mire. But his instinct was to protect the car, to stop it getting muddy. So he held it out in front of him and by holding his arms out like that he stopped himself sinking any further and we leant over and hauled him out, oozing with black peat, like some urchin fallen down a chimney.
The train glides across the flow. Fences beside the track to hold the drifting snow. Tundra accents: greylag, skua, greenshank, golden plover. Wild cat and otter’s braided tracks. Sphagnum’s crimson greens. Red deer, nomads in a great wet desert, stepping between the myriad lochans. Mark the deer, for they can blend into the backdrop of the flow as a hare in ermine folds itself against the snow.
Then the train is pulling into Forsinard, where the Norse language has flanked around the bog and found an opening to the south through the long, fertile reach of Strath Halladale. And halfway down the strath met and fused with Gaelic making something beautiful. Forsinard: ‘the waterfall on the height’. Fors from the Norse (waterfall); an from the Gaelic (of the); aird from the Gaelic (height). Clothes still dank with Orkney rain, smelling of rain, I stepped down off the train, crossed the single-track road, and walked out into the bog in search of merlins.
What else does he have in his knapsack, his machine? He has taken it off while he pauses to rest at Banchory, 23 miles out of Aberdeen. He leaves the road, sheds his coat and washes his hands and feet in the river Dee. He notices how people’s accent here has slipped away from Aberdeen, a softening in the tone, a slower pace to it, as if the dialect here still carries a memory of Gaelic. And sure enough, a little further up the road he passes two men on horseback talking in Gaelic. He speaks Gaelic himself, has considerable knowledge of Scots and its many dialects. All along his journey he passes through the ebb and flow of dialect. Every mile along the road accents are shaved a fraction. Often he struggles to make himself understood. He might follow a seam of Gaelic like a thin trail through the landscape until it peters out on the outskirts of a town.
What else is in his knapsack? Two black lead pencils; eight camel-hair pencils with stalks; an Indian rubber; a shirt; a false neck; two pairs of short stockings; a soap box; two razors; a sharpening stone; a lancet; a pair of scissors; some thread; needles. In a small pocket in the inner side of his flannel undervest there is nine pounds sterling in bank notes. One pound in silver is secured in a purse of chamois leather kept in a pocket of his trousers. In all, ten pounds to last him through to London.
That first day he walks as far as Aboyne, 30 miles from Aberdeen. That night, at the inn, he writes in his journal until the candle has burnt down. He writes a long list of all the plants he has seen that day, both those in and out of flower. He dreams again of the museum, the place obsesses his dreams. But this dreaming is inevitable because the museum is the reason he is making this walk to London. He has heard that the British Museum holds an astonishing collection of beasts and birds, of all the creatures that have been found upon the face of the earth. And he must go to London to see these things. There are gaps in his knowledge, in the survey of himself, he needs to fill. As a student at Aberdeen he studied medicine for nearly five years, then, in 1817, switched to zoology. Since then he has devoted himself completely to studying the natural world. Linnaeus and Pennant have been his guides but now he has reached the point where he needs to set what he has learnt of the natural world against the museum’s collection. He wants to check his own observations and theories against the museum’s. Above all, he wants to see the museum’s collection of British birds. Birds are what stir him more than anything. He is anxious to get there, to get on with his life.
The way I’d pictured it, back home planning this journey, was a neat transition: Orkney’s hen harriers followed by merlins out on The Flows. Instead, on Orkney, merlins had darted through my days, led me astray across the moor in search of them. Then, not far out of Forsinard, in a large expanse of forestry, the first bird I saw was a male hen harrier, a shard of light, hunting the canopy.
Before I set out on this journey I had planned to try to look for each species of raptor in a different place, to dedicate a bird to a particular landscape, or rather the landscape to the bird, to immerse myself as much as I could in each bird’s habitat. But the plan unravelled soon after I lay down in the heather on Orkney and a jack merlin, a plunging meteor, dropped from the sky, wings folded back behind him, diving straight at a kestrel who had drifted over the merlin’s territory. It was astonishing to see the size difference between the birds, the merlin a speck, a frantic satellite, buzzing around the kestrel. He was furious, screaming at the kestrel, diving repeatedly at the larger bird until the kestrel relented and let the wind slice it away down the valley.
I stayed with that jack merlin for much of the day. Sometimes I would catch a flash of him circling the horizon or zipping low across the hillside, full tilt, breakneck speed. The sense of sprung energy in this tiny bird of prey was extraordinary, a fizzing atom, bombarding the sky.
Once I tracked the merlin down into a dusty peat hollow below clouds of heather. I marked the spot and started to walk slowly down the moor towards him. Grandmother’s footsteps: every few paces I froze and watched him through my binoculars. At each pause the colours of his slate-blue back grew sharper. Even at rest he was a quivering ball of energy, primed to spring up and fling himself out and up. Relentless, fearless, missile of the moor, you would not be able to shake him off once he had latched on to you. There are stories of merlins – like William MacGillivray’s account of watching a merlin pursuing a lark amongst farm steadings and corn-stacks – where the falcon is so locked in on the pursuit of a wheatear, skylark, stonechat, finch or pipit (the merlin’s most common prey species) it follows them into buildings, garages, in and out of people’s homes. Even a ship out in the Atlantic, 500 miles west of Cape Wrath, became, for a week, a merlin’s hunting ground. The crew reported that the merlin – on migration from Iceland – hitched a ride with them, chasing small migrant birds all over the ship, darting across the gunwale, around coiled hillocks of rope, perching on the bright orange fenders.
They don’t always get away with it, this all-out pursuit; merlins have been known to kill themselves, colliding with walls, fences, trees. Merlins need the space – the sort of space there is on The Flows – to run their prey down. They do not possess the sparrowhawk’s agility to hunt through the tight landscape of a wood.
I am still playing grandmother’s footsteps with the merlin, but I do not get very far before one of the short-eared owls overtakes me and swoops low over the merlin, disturbing him, dusting him, so that he flicks away out of the peat hollow and lands again further down the slope. I mark his position. This time he has landed on a fence post.