Earlier this year we posted two stories (Part 1 and Part 2) about a visit on 9th March 2025, with Gordon Rothero, to the site of this 18th century farm north of Manse Loch (NC0925). The area has not been inhabited for at least 150 years, but its landscape bears many signs of former occupation, including some striking ‘greens’. We had promised ourselves another visit later in the year, and finally got there on 19th July.
We followed the path from the road to Manse Loch, crossed over the stepping stones of the upper sluice, and then traversed the area in the opposite direction from that in March (map, photo 1).
There is a narrow and often overgrown deer track running eastwards through the woodland along the north side of the loch. It eventually emerges from the woodland and then angles up to the north-east, crossing into our target 1km square at NC094250. Here we stopped for a ‘cuppa’ before starting to record in earnest.
We had already logged, between the road and this point (NC0924), a variety of butterflies, with four sightings of scotch argus and one each of meadow brown, green-veined white and dark-green fritillary. We later noted the same four species in the target square (NC0925), together with several large heaths; 2025 was a good year for butterflies. Also seen on the way in were common blue damselfly, golden-ringed dragonfly and meadow grasshopper.
Lochan
Our route took us along the eastern edge of the flat boggy area named on the map, rather intriguingly, as Raon na Ceardaich (mossy plain of the forge or smithy), to a small lochan covered in white water-lilies (photo 2). There were a few plants of bogbean in the shallows and a small island covered with bog asphodel, getting to the end of its flowering (photo 3).
Mating pairs of emerald damselflies were egg-laying on emergent stems of many-stalked spike-rush (photo 4) and another golden-ringed dragonfly was patrolling the lochan. On the surface of the water there were small groups of highly mobile pond-skaters, possibly the moorland species Gerris costai (photos 5-6).
The water-lilies merited a closer look, since their flowers are magnificent, but also because some of the leaves bore neat rows of elongated holes (photos 7-9). They were almost certainly leaf-mines made by the aquatic larvae of the brown china-mark moth Elophila nympheata. They cut out two fragments of the leaf and make a floating case for their continued development.
Mire, burn and crag
Around the lochan, more acid parts of the surrounding mire were dominated by the pale heads of white beak-sedge (photo 10). Large heath butterflies were seen in the vicinity, and elsewhere; their larvae feed on the hare’s-tail cottongrass found in such areas.
The exit burn from the lochan contained, in places, a dense mixture of bog pondweed and Nordic bladderwort (photo 11). The latter has robust flattened leaves, and is the commonest of several species of bladderwort found locally. However, it very rarely flowers, so its identity has to be confirmed by examining the bladders under a microscope.
Lunch was taken on a grassy ridge above the burn, looking up the valley of the substantial Allt Loch an Tuirc, which empties into the Manse Loch, towards Quinag on the skyline (photo 12). The long fence running up the valley probably marks the boundary between the estates of the Assynt Crofters’ Trust and the Vestey family, who previously owned all of Assynt.
We then made our way north to a small bouldery crag with areas of bare soil (photo 13), which provided a contrast with the wet areas so far explored. In the soil and adjacent rock crevices there were scattered plants, some in flower, of one of the hawkweeds (photo 14). This was later identified by Brian Burrow, the BSBI referee for this difficult group, as a ‘very small form with sharp small teeth’, of Hieracium triviale form triviale. Under its former name of H. vulgatum form vulgatum, the species was described, in the Flora of Assynt (2002), as the most widespread hawkweed in the parish; this was, however, the first record for the 21st century.
Some of the flowering stems of the hawkweed had succulent swellings (photo 15), galls caused by the gall-wasp Aulacidea hieracii. Although ‘locally common’ further south, according to the gall literature, there are no Scottish records on NBN north of Perth, so a nice find.
Nearby, we found an orchid spike with young fruits (photo 16). By collecting the remains of a flower and rehydrating it later, we were able to work out the shape of the lip and spur, enabling us to name it as a heath fragrant-orchid. It was a bit late in the year for orchids; the only other one found was a heath spotted-orchid, which can be recognised by its dark-blotched leaves.
Former cultivated areas and ‘greens’
Climbing up from the crag (photo 17), we made for a large walled area covered with bracken (photo 18). It is one of several in the vicinity marked on Home’s map of 1774 as ‘arable’, former cultivated ground, often over-run by this robust fern, which is a good indicator of well-drained fertile soils. Apart from the difficulty of forcing our way through the bracken, it did not look as if it was going to provide anything new, so we turned back at this point.
We skirted an old ruin, alongside which, on an outcrop, there was the lone rowan so frequently found in such situations, possibly planted, for good fortune, back in the 19th century (photo 19).
We then made our way over to the largest of the ‘greens’ that had so intrigued us in the spring (photo 20). Another former cultivated area, it supported, instead of bracken, a dense grassy sward. This contained predictable perennial herbs such as common mouse-ear, ribwort plantain, selfheal and white clover but, regrettably, nothing really uncommon. However, it did provide records of three grasses that had hitherto eluded us, sweet vernal-grass, false oat-grass and spreading meadow-grass.
There was also some germander speedwell bearing, as it frequently does, the hairy galls of the gall-wasp Jaapiella veronicae. The sward is grazed short, currently by red deer, and presumably by sheep and cattle in the past, but we have no idea why some of these areas are overgrown with bracken and others not.
We did not see any deer on this occasion, but there was plenty of evidence of their fondness for these ‘greens’, including dung and large numbers of very small ticks, which swarmed onto our hands as we investigated the sward.
There was a meadow brown flying over the ‘green’, and nearby Gwen noted two small moths, a straw dot Rivula sericealis and a straw grass-moth Agriphila straminella (photo 21); the larvae of all three species feed on grasses. On the edge of the ‘green’ there was a striking ice-smoothed outcrop of Lewisian gneiss (photo 22), with succulent-leaved plants of English stonecrop nestling in hollows (photo 23), the only time we came across it on that day.
Turning for home
We had an extended tea break on the edge of the ‘green’ and then started back below the old habitation sites, on level, if rough, ground scored with banks and ditches, reflecting its intensive use over many centuries (photo 24).
Climbing up through woodland on the back of the ridge north of Manse Loch, we stopped briefly at the top, right above the upper sluice, to admire the zoned patches of vegetation on the loch, composed of common club-rush and white water-lilies (photos 25-27).
We had spent nearly seven hours reaching and recording this area for a second time, adding a further 51 species of flowering plants, making a grand total of 123. We also logged some 33 records of butterflies, moths, dragonflies, spiders, galls, a rove beetle and a smut fungus on a sedge. Curiously, the only vertebrate seen all day was a solitary frog in a ditch.
We have, perhaps, arrived at a somewhat better understanding of this rather complicated stretch of the local landscape, once intensively-worked, but since inadvertently ‘rewilded’, and now visited by very few people. However, looking at our routes on the map, we have still covered only about a quarter of 1km square NC0925, so there is plenty more for future generations of naturalists to explore and enjoy.
Ian M. Evans and Gwen Richards