were lodged to incubate their eggs in the warmth.
I get up to stretch my legs and go for a wander through the network of peat hags. I liked the notion of geese being ‘let in’ to people’s homes, of the architectural twist made to houses to accommodate the birds. In the Hebrides, if someone had an especially lucky day, it was said that they must have seen the Clamhan luch. In Devon the hen harrier was known as the Furze hawk; in Caithness the Flapper; Hebog llwydlas (the blue-grey hawk) in Wales; Saint Julian’s bird in South Wales; in the English Midlands the Blue hawk … We ought to let these birds back in. Today you can count the number of hen harriers nesting in England on your hand. And each year lop another finger off. They are not where they should be and their absence in the English uplands is shameful, a waste. A landscape devoid of hen harriers is an impoverished one. Hen harriers do predate red grouse – young grouse and weaker adult stock are the most vulnerable. But management of grouse moors and protection of hen harriers should not – does not need to – be incompatible. We need to let the harriers back in. Because a bird like this can change the way you see a landscape. Because (I promise you this) these birds will astonish you with their beauty. I wish others could see what I saw over Orkney, how the harriers made a ballet of the sky. I wish more people had the chance to see how the black wing tips of the male hen harrier are offset – made blacker – by his pearl-grey upper wings.
Some of the peat hags are so deeply cut into the moor it is like walking through a trench system. I can move across a flank of the hill without being seen. Except, of course, the short-eared owls have seen me. One of the adult birds has swum over to hover above my head. I can see the flickering gold and black patterns of its plumage, the gold like a dusting of pollen over its feathers. I sit down on the peat bank while the owl’s shadow grazes over me. Earlier, I watched one of the owls and a male hen harrier hunting over the same patch of moorland. The owl seemed to hold something back. At least, the owl was not quite as fluid as the male harrier, who appeared to give himself over completely to the wind, like an appendage of the wind, sketching its currents and eddies, its tributaries of warm air.
Later: the moor is woken by a loud clapping noise. I peer over the trench and an owl is spiralling downwards, ‘clapping’ his wings together as he descends, signalling, displaying to his mate, bringing his great wings down beneath him as if he were crashing a pair of cymbals, whacking the air to show how much he owns it.
I follow the line of an old fence across the hill. Beneath one of the fence posts I find a small pile of harrier pellets. They look like chrysalids, parcels of hair wrapped around hints of bone as if something were forming in there. I can make out the tiny jawbone of a vole with a row of teeth along its edge, like a frayed clarinet reed.
The quiet ran on through the early afternoon. I hadn’t expected this, that the moor could shush itself and doze in the day’s thin warmth. How does a bird that was once seen as a harbinger of good fortune in the Hebrides become so reviled? Three hundred and fifty-one hen harriers are killed on two estates in Ayrshire between 1850 and 1854; one keeper on Skye kills thirty-two harriers in a single year in 1870; another, on the same island, accounts for twenty-five hen harriers in 1873. An article on Highland sports in The Quarterly Review of 1845 illustrates the attitudes of the day:
Hawks of all sorts, from eagles to merlins destroy numbers [of game]. The worst of the family, and the most difficult to be destroyed is the hen harrier. Living wholly on birds of his own killing, he will come to no laid bait; and hunting in an open country, he is rarely approached near enough to be shot: skimming low, and quartering his ground like a well-trained pointer, he finds almost every bird, and with sure aim strikes down all he finds.
Though not so difficult to be destroyed as this article posits. The hen harrier, in fact (as Victorian game-book records testify), made an easy target: a large, slow-flying, ground-nesting bird with a tendency, amongst the females especially, to be fearless around humans when defending their nest. Female hen harriers are not unknown to dislodge hats, even scrape a person’s scalp with their talons, should they venture too close to the nest.
A male harrier drifts along the horizon. He lands on a fence post and begins to preen. The fence follows the horizon and the harrier, perched there, is silhouetted against the backdrop of sky. He glimmers there. Then he drops, pirouettes, hesitates a few feet above the moor and lunges into the grass. It is a quick, purposeful drop, not like the half-hearted pounces I have seen. I know straight away he has killed. I can see him in the grass plucking, tearing at something. After this, he feeds for several minutes. Then he is up and carrying the prey in his talons, flying direct to the nest site. And there is the female rising, making straight towards him.
My last day on the islands. I decide, reluctantly, to leave the Orkney Mainland and its hen harriers and travel to the southernmost isle in the archipelago, South Ronaldsay. I have heard about a place on the island called ‘The Tomb of the Eagles’, a Neolithic chambered cairn overlooking the cliffs at Isbister. And, well … the tomb’s name is enough to make me want to visit.
Late morning and I am walking out across the fields towards the cliffs at Isbister. The heath shimmers in the warm air. In the distance, a broken farmstead surfaces out of the heath like a whale. When I find the tomb I lie down beside the sea pink and begin to crawl along the narrow tunnel that leads into the tomb’s interior. Inside, it is a nest of cool air. The stone walls are rent with algae sores, green and verdigris capillaries. I make my way to the far end of the tomb and duck into a side chamber; it has a moonscape floor, sandy, strewn with pebbles. I sit down inside the cell with my back against the rock.
In 1958, Ronnie Simison, a farmer from South Ronaldsay, was walking over his land looking for stone to quarry for use as fence posts. He walked along the sea cliffs at the eastern edge of his farm. Below him fulmars were nesting on sandstone ledges, a seal was berthing in Ham Geo, curlews moved amongst marsh orchids and eyebright. Perhaps it was the pink splash of sea thrift that caught his eye and drew him to the arrangement of stones the weather had recently exposed, a grassy mound peeled back to reveal a sneak of wall. A spade was fetched and Simison began to dig down beside the wall. As he dug the stones spilt things about his feet as if his spade had disturbed a crèche of voles. He picked each object up and laid it out beside him on the grass: a limestone knife; a stone axe head; a black bead, polished and shiny, that stared back at him like an eye. Then his spade had found an opening and darkness was spilling out of a doorway like oil. He fumbled in his pockets and pulled out a cigarette lighter, stretched his arm into the darkness and flicked the lighter’s wheel. The bronze shapes he saw flickering back at him must have made him nearly drop the lighter. Certainly, the story goes, Simison ran the mile back across the swaying grassland to his home where, breathless and sweating, he picked up the telephone and called the police.
Inside the tomb I can hear a curlew trilling above the heath. I crawl back down along the tunnel and out into the bright sea glare. My trousers are covered in dust from sitting on the cell’s floor and, as I walk along the cliffs, it looks like my legs are smoking as the breeze cleans the dust from my clothes.
The darkness Ronnie Simison’s spade had cut loose from the mound that summer’s evening was 5,000 years old. The mound was a Neolithic chambered cairn, and staring back at Simison when he sparked his lighter into the dark hole was a shelf of human skulls, resinous in the flickering light. There might have been a second or two when Simison mistook the bones’ bronzed colours for a cache of treasure before he realised what they were, grabbed his spade, and ran.
When the tomb came to be excavated, amongst the human bones it was discovered that there were many bones and talons belonging to white-tailed sea eagles. In all, seventy sea-eagle talons were found and, in some instances, the birds’ talons had been placed beside the bones of human individuals (one person had been buried with fifteen talons and the bones of two sea eagles). It is estimated that there were thirty-five skeletons of birds of prey in the tomb and of these two-thirds belonged to sea eagles.
The
