OUT AND ABOUT WITH RALPH: Caithness in bloom with unique abundance of wildflowers
For a few weeks every year, Caithness excels in wild flowers. There used to be many better places but almost all wild flower meadows further south have disappeared as a result of extensive fertiliser use.
Here, roadside verges and damp, uncultivated ground remain strongholds. As do clifftops and sea coasts. But there is very little protection against things like overzealous verge-cutting or a change of ownership and land-use, and it is largely up to chance that fine displays survive.
Think of July, and think of huge banks of creamy-white meadowsweet, maybe along the Halkirk-Calder road or the amazing display by the bridge at Forss where for many years a small field filled with a mix of meadowsweet and tall red rosebay-willowherb has delighted Dounreay commuters.
Nowhere else but in Caithness do you see the spikes of yellow bog ashphodel growing in thickets, it’s just a sparse flower in the moors of the west.
The little Scottish primrose grows only here and Orkney, in short coastal grass, a display of dozens of flowers on a clifftop near Thurso is an amazing sight. Then there is the tiny blue oyster flower with fleshy leaves, very scarce among sandy rocks above the tide-line.
If you’ve enjoyed the gardens at the Castle of Mey, just walk down to the shore for another fine flower display of white mayweed, red clover and yellow birdsfoot trefoil growing thickly above the beach without any cultivation or management!
And if you search, you’ll find several good clumps of oyster plant. The shell beach along from Castletown is another good site.
In spite of an information board at the Dunnet mid-sands car park, few visit the magnificent machair displays across the road, now a “coronation meadow”. The spectacular globe buttercups are over, as is the yellow kidney vetch, but now the blue harebells and the beautiful single white flowers of grass of parnassus spangle the short grass.
There are eyebrights and scented orchids (bend down and smell them!), field gentians and the green twayblade, as well as a few Scots primose if you search! You might even find the great yellow bumblebee – not that I’ve seen it this year. But likely there will be the joyous common blue butterfly flitting on a fine day.
Even ordinary weeds can give good displays, a dense thicket of the thistles for example, blue meadow thistle, the tall dark purple marsh thistle and the globes of Scottish thistle. Tall dockans in full seed on cliff ledges can be quite a sight.
Or a stony track covered in pineapple weed. A big bank of purple and white foxgloves. A field of buttercup. Even ground-elder gave a dramatic display of greenish umbels a few weeks ago, mixed with thickets of white and purple cuckoo flower near Skirza. No gardener could have produced better.
Look out for the pink campion and the truly ragged flowers of ragged robin in wet places. See the big white umbels of angelica, or the uncommon Scots lovage on clifftops.
There will be banks of yellow bedstraw and lady’s mantle on the roadsides, the bright eyes of blue forget-me-nots shining from wet ditches, perhaps the delight of a clump of thyme, one of my favourites, in a surprising place like a stony bit of old road on Scrabster Brae (wild mountain thyme, purple with a lovely scent, always makes me think of summer on Foinaven).
Not to mention the ordinary heather, we don’t get the purple mountainsides you see further south but there are lovely displays by the Broubster road. And yes, on the wet moors you will find, as Ewan MacColl sang, the blue milkwort and the sundew hung with diamonds (and tiny white flowers in August).
Can you find the tall spikes and little purple flowers of water figwort, which only grows in two or three places? Or the white lesser butterfly orchid, which grows thickly where it grows in just a few spots? Maybe a waterlily or two?
The best way to see the wild flowers is to cycle the lanes, slowly, and to walk along the less-visited shorelines. See how many different ones you can count – if you visit a variety of habitats it is possible to exceed 100 without having to be the sort of expert who can identify different eyebrights.
So many in Caithness do not know what we have got. Surprisingly few paintings in the recent artists’ exhibition were inspired by our natural displays. And you can’t really see wild flowers from a car. Get out in the fresh air, go and look!
