Amanda Thomson

Amanda Thomson is a visual artist and writer who makes work in and about the Highlands of Scotland. She is a lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art. Her essays have been published in books and journals including The Willowherb Review and the anthologies Antlers of Water, Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland; The Wild Isles, an anthology of the best of British and Irish Nature writing and Gifts of Gravity and Light, An Almanac for the 21st Century. She also writes for The Guardian Country Diary. She lives and works in Strathspey and Glasgow. Her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature, is published by Saraband Books and her second book will be published by Canongate in August 2022.

WINTER HAAR

It’s a day when our drive takes us in and out of the freezing fog that hangs and lies along rivers and valley floors and if we were to walk across the fields it would be with a crunch, and the grasses and stubble would glisten. For a time, and to our north, a fogbow – a perfect white arch against the blue sky – accompanies us as we head east, always above the speeding shadow of our car. As we get closer to the coast, wind turbines appear briefly and scythe into the grey below them and the blue above, until they, and everything beyond fades completely in a thick, freezing haar. It doesn’t roll in, we roll into it and it sits low and heavy and chill.
Then I’m at Forvie and the Ythan Estuary, here for the wildfowl and the geese and to walk amongst the sand dunes to the beach to see the sea, but the lines between water and sky are blurred by a grey that saps the world of colour and sharpness. There’s a softening which renders everything, and everybody, undefined and nebulous.
I know that Newburgh is just across the water, but beyond a thin sand-spit full of waders there’s nothing but haar. The waders themselves are indistinct and I have to rely on what I know of their shapes to tell what at least some of them are. Crested heads and the thick flap of wings indicate that one cluster is lapwings. Three curlews fly past in formation, with their long bills curving downwards, and I think I see some plovers too, with shorter, stockier bills, but I just can’t be sure. The curlews land in the water and I wonder if they ever misjudge its depth, they touch down so quickly, and with such certainty.
It’s cold. Juniper bushes are dew-laden, though as we brush pass the drops remain as solid jewels of ice. The woody stalks and tops of umbrels look like windblown, upturned umbrella spokes and hold glistening cobwebs that are thickened and ice-encrusted.
It’s a fey kind of day, and the weather feels somehow appropriate to this place full of constant movements and change. There’s been human presence here since the end of the last Ice Age, and evidence of Stone and Bronze age peoples have been found, including flints and middens, axe-heads and pots. Who knows what else lies beneath still, and today feels like the kind of day when their spectres might appear out of the thick air.
It’s a place of seasonal arrivals and departures too – the wintering wildfowl are here now, and the terns, with their concomitant noise, left at the end of the summer and they won’t return until the spring; the vibrant summer colours of orchids and other flowers are long gone; the moths and butterflies are hibernating until the return of warmer weather.
We walk the line of the estuary, and a little ways on, a seal’s head bobs up, then another, and close by, soft oooh and aahs (that sound just like Kenneth Williams) come from a flock of eiders. The males bob with their still defined blackness and whiteness, though I have to imagine the subtle pale green of their napes. I watch two redshanks fly low across the water close to the shore, trailing their misty pink legs behind them, until I’m distracted by a pair of merganser that duck down underneath the water with barely a ripple, and pop up again a good four metres further away.
Just before we enter the dunes, the orange-yellow sparks of flowers from a single gorse bush pop, and cracked mussels pepper the path.
Forvie is one of the largest mobile, shifting dune systems in Scotland. As we walk, following the footprints of others in the sand, I imagine that behind me a dune might tiptoe forward a couple of feet, cartoon-style, then stand stock still again when I turn around to look at it. Or that more distant dunes might run off completely. Three crows come in with a caw, perch on top of a couch grassed dune, then fly off through the slacks, fading away, their conversation audible long after they disappear.
At the beach, the water is shrouded too and waves roll in out of nothing. I imagine there’s a line of scoters or long tailed ducks or pintails just beyond what I can see, but I’ll never know. A gull comes and goes. Just before a wave rises and falls another seal appears, seems to look right at me, but after the wave rises and crashes beyond is a flat calm again and I can’t tell when I am looking at sea or sky. People walking away ahead of me disappear from view, and a different bunch emerge, approaching as another wader, this time a knot - white, with grey and black moments - lands briefly in the froth and foam before me, then takes off and moves on again when their scottie terrier comes out of the mist with a bark.
The mist thickens to a smirr and larger water droplets gather on jackets and specs. As we cut back up from the beach, following a signpost that’s only just become visible, we’re suddenly on moorland, a lichen-strewn heath that glows like luminescence on a watch. It’s a place from where you’d expect the silent apparition of a short-eared owl, but there’s just a solitary stonechat that darts out in front of us from tree to bush, before disappearing back away into the fog. When we return to the estuary, the tide’s gone out a little, and the waders stand still, feeding in the soft sand and puddles that remain.