The Rocks Remain –
But Rarely Unmoved
The Flow Country
Much of Durness, Tongue and Farr is covered in blanket bog. The Flow Country – sometimes called The Patterned Lands - is so significant and rare that it is now a World Heritage Site. Indeed over 75% of the land in Mackay Country is covered by some type of environmental designation in acknowledgment of the importance of the variety of habitats and landscapes to be found there.
The Flow Country is a very important breeding ground for migratory waders and wildfowl. These flows attract birds which usually breed in Scandinavia, Siberia and Iceland – and birds which winter in West Africa. The greenshank and dunlin arrive each summer from West Africa. Redshank, wigeon and red-throated divers thrive here in the big open spaces. The Flow Country is the only place on mainland Britain where arctic skua breed while common scoters and wood sandpipers nest in very few other places.
In these and other wet places in Mackay Country are found interesting plants like sundew and butterwort, both of which eat flies to get extra nutrients in this tough environment. Bog asphodel, bog cotton, heathers, heath-spotted orchids, tormentil and lousewort spring up in damp boggy ground. Deep sphagnum mosses grow slowly and quietly while dwarf birches and willows maintain bonsai proportions. The light flashing on the wings of a flitting dragonfly is a delight on summer days.
To people here the blanket bog is so large and prevalent that it is sometimes hard to see why people elsewhere in the world consider it so exceptional. The harsh experience of the Clearances in Sutherland, and the hardships of the following century, have made local crofting communities very suspicious of attempts by outside forces to control or influence the use of local land. In the 1980s, under the old Nature Conservancy Council, debate over who could do what with the Flow Country flared up and inspired a local song about the controversy.
Today more productive working relationships have been established with SNH as the important role of local knowledge has become more respected and practical management options like the Peatland Management Scheme have made real contributions to the finances of local Grazings Committees. Nonetheless the people of Mackay Country remain fiercely independent and individual - and will never take well to too much in the way of paper, bureaucracy or rules.
Cnoc and Lochan
Between the high peaks and the low ground of the straths, glens and coast is a great patchwork of distinctive habitats. On the western seaboard of Mackay Country is the ancient Lewisian gneiss – one of the oldest rocks in Europe at 3,000 million years old and deemed to be part of the earth’s crust as it was 3 billion years ago. Here, in what is known by geologists as the Foreland, the action of glaciers during the Ice Age has created the classic ‘cnoc and lochan’ landscape.
These places are characterised by low lying, hummocky expanses with many little hills, small flows and numerous lochans. Here black bog rush, wild mountain thyme and ladies’ mantle are common as are black throated divers and dunlin. The numerous little lochs provide brown trout fishing as far as the eye can see and in the shallows grow bogbean, an important plant in traditional medicine.
Ancient Oceans
Gaelic place-names frequently provide a word-picture of the location to which they refer. Sometimes the description refers to past landuses, historic events or people from the past. Sometimes the place-name is as evocative now as it must have been when someone first invented it. Ceathramh Garbh, between Loch Laxford and Loch Inchard still describes this ‘cnoc and lochan’ landscape perfectly – The Rough Quarter.
Standing on Cnoc Loch an Ròin (Hillock of the Loch of the Seals) today, the view westwards is of the Minch and the Western Isles. Six hundred billion years back the lie of the land was very different. The Torridonian sandstone from which the hills between Loch Inchard and Cape Wrath (Pharphe) were formed was laid down in a warm sea, named The Iapetus Ocean by geologists after a Greek god. This sandstone lies on top of a bedrock of Lewissian gneiss. Inliers of Lewissian gneiss are also found around Loch Naver, Bettyhill and Skerray in the form of low hills like Creag Ach nam Bat at Skerray,
Back then, in the Precambrian era Scotland was close to what is now the North American continent and separated from England by this ocean. This land mass which included Scotland and Northern Ireland – named Laurentia - passed through a great variety of climatic zones – tropical, desert and temperate. Due to plate tectonics – or continental drift - the Iapetus Ocean gradually closed about 410 million years ago, forming what we know as the British Isles today.
Inland from the coast of the parishes of Durness and Eddrachilles is the world famous Moine Thrust Zone. In many ways the science of geology was born in Scotland and some of the most significant geological discoveries were made in north west Sutherland. The complex geology of this area still draws hundreds of geology students and researchers annually.