Exploring Quinag: Roadsides West of Loch Unapool
May 2022 was unusually wet, with rain on all but three days. The forecast for early June looked better, so I thought it was time to sharpen up my plant recording skills. Our main aim this year is to visit neglected corners of the John Muir Trust’s estate, and I thought I might start, on 1st June, with 1km square NC2331, on the coast road (B869) west of Loch Unapool.
Verge survey
I had just the afternoon to spare, so parked at the southern end of the loch (NC227316), which is on the eastern boundary of the estate, to see what contribution roadside verges west of this point made to the plant-life of the area.
It took me a couple of hours to record some 1.5km of roadside, out along the northern verge and back on the south (photo 1). In places the verges bear well-established grassy swards, previously close-grazed by sheep and red deer, now only by deer. Elsewhere soil and rocks have been dumped, during the last decade or so, to widen lay-bys or just left in heaps.
The results were a surprise. Of a total of 90 species listed, 60 were either on the verges themselves, in roadside ditches, or in adjacent small quarries and scrapes dating back to the construction of the road in about 1905. So, in effect, two-thirds of the flora occurs in that immediate area because of the presence of the road.
A small selection of my finds gives something of the flavour. There were three horsetails, including the predictable ‘weedy’ field horsetail Equisetum arvense, but also water horsetail E. fluviatile and wood horsetail E. sylvaticum in ditches. The tiny dioecious sedge Carex dioica was found with new bronzy leaves of pale butterwort Pinguicula lusistanica and the ‘giveaway’ black bog-rush Schoenus nigricans in an old gravelly borrow-pit with evident base-flushing (photo 2). Older dumped material containing lumps of limestone contributed yellow saxifrage Saxifraga aizoides, and more recent additions housed seedling hazels Corylus avellana and a small bush of raspberry Rubus idaeus, which grows wild in Assynt.
Peat cuttings and bog pools
At the western end of the area surveyed (NC222319), there is a well-marked track on the north side, leading to a fairly recent peat cutting, quite an unusual sight in Assynt nowadays (photo 3) . I do wonder why this is still happening, given the thousands of years it takes for peat to form, and all the carbon it locks up.
Across the road, on the south side, there are some bog pools, possibly on the site of much older peat cuttings (photo 4, NC222318), which I had noticed many times but never visited. Bogbean Menyanthes trifoliata was conspicuous, with its lovely frilly-edged pink and white flowers, but I also found underwater the stringy green stems of some bladderworts. They bore fat over-wintering buds, and a few new bladders. Later examination of samples, under a microscope, showed both lesser bladderwort Utricularia minor and nordic bladderwort U. stygia to be present.
Animal life was sparse, despite the warm sunshine: a fast-flying adult fox moth, the papery cocoon of a drinker moth (photo 5) beside the peat track, and distant cuckoo, meadow pipit and skylark. However, the afternoon had successfully jump-started my recording season. It had also revealed how much roadside verges contribute to local biodiversity, albeit just in slivers of the landscape.
Ian M. Evans