In their bimonthly letter-swap, crofters Kirsteen Bell and Annie Worsley discuss transformation and biodiversity governed by hands, teeth, tongues and hooves.

Dear Annie,

I’m starting this letter from a sea-hemmed field in North Uist, Uibhist a Tuabh. I’m here to meet other crofters to get a better understanding of how we might work with our own croft. However, I’ve brought the kids with me, so their interruptions might mean you get this letter in stages… I could have come alone, but they need to understand the crofting landscape and its future just as much as I do. 

Have you ever been? Right this minute, there is a skylark trilling and burbling over the cows still browsing in the fading light, and in the soft grass between us and the dunes, lapwings, oystercatchers and redshanks peep continuously over the waves’ hush. Though the kids are currently more interested in the marshmallows and the fire we’ve lit before the sunset, I hope the rest will take root in their hearts too.

We were given a wee tour of a South Uist machair today, the crofter driving the pick-up aware of every tern sitting on eggs. He stopped by one of those hollows and it took me minutes to get my eye in enough to see the eggs, pale and speckled like the sandy soil in which they rested. He could spot them from metres away, his eyes attuned over decades. In another recently ploughed patch, he showed us where they had lifted a nest carefully out of the way of the machines, then placed it back. Tern parents, he said, will return as long as you get it within a metre of its original location. Oystercatcher nests have to be replaced exactly; he would mark the spot with a drinks bottle or whatever he had to hand to make sure the birds could carry on undisturbed. 

I am swept away by the wind and open horizons of Uibhist. I sent photos to L, who is jealous: it’s hard not to compare our rough steep tangle of trees and ditches, rushes, and bramble unfavourably. Level fields, dotted with little houses and lochans, that stretch from the western shore to low hills in the east seem homogenous to an outsider’s eyes, belying the truth of Uists’ complexities. 

In South Uist, I’m told, the crofts are larger, with smaller hill grazing. Crofts and machair tenancies are split over multiple areas for individual crofters, so that if one area ends up under water or storm damaged, another will still be workable. Machair rotation of ploughing, cropping and fallow years provides grazing as well as the hill, with cows let graze in the resting years to fertilise the earth.

Conversely, in North Uist the crofts are smaller with larger hill grazing. When we visited the east side it instantly felt more familiar to me, as the crofters there work with acidic peaty soil, pulling rocks from every dug spadeful. One crofter we met, working on the southern shore of Loch Euport, has been planting trees and shrubs, all heavily protected from the constant wind. Above the pallet windbreaks, the uppermost leaves were tattered, growing more slowly. 

I know well enough that crofting itself is far from homogenous: we all respond to the strength of our wind, the soil under our feet, and the different legacies we have been left.

***

As suspected, I’m finishing this letter from home. When we drove down through Skye and back into Lochaber the hills and trees came closer, tucking up around us like a blanket under the chin. Bats whirred through the open spaces above the road in that leaf-darkened twilight, woodland so thick along the single track it is like travelling through a tunnel. 

Driving up the brae to the house though, I noticed that after just one trip to visit other crofts, to see the way in which other people choose to work with their landscape, I already feel more settled with how our own croft is looking. The trees that North Uist crofter fights so hard for grow easily here. Yes, it is hard ground if it were to be cultivated for silage or hay again, but tiny saplings root in every slope and ditch. So much so that when I lift out a few birch or oak to send to that woodland crofter as a thank you, it won’t have the faintest effect.

In fact, from where I’m writing to you now, sitting on the dilapidated decking at the back of our house, just lifting my eyes a few inches from the page I can see handfuls of willow, oak, and birch. Tiny little saplings reach out from the bank that itself is a riot of brambles, heather, ferns and moss, and dotted with the last of the bluebells. 

I love these trees, the moss, the closeness of it all. But after a few days on Uist I can see how I would fall in love with the terns and redshanks and lapwings, and yes — even the cows. Our hearts heft to wherever feels like home, I guess.

While we will never have the expanse of sandy fertile soil here, I’m starting to see the shape of something. The mature trees would be shelter for cows maybe, a light breed like Dexters who will knock back rushes and bracken, and leave more divots for birch seed to gather in.

I’d love to know how you work conservation grazing around tree-planting and your own grazings — are you ever tempted to keep a steer or a heifer or two in that gorgeous barn of yours?

With love from Lochaber,

Kx

*

Dear Kirsteen,

It’s June, midsummer. How has this happened? Thank you for your lovely letter from Uist. I have never been but the eldest daughter of one of our South Erradale crofting families married a cattle man from North Uist, so I feel connected through her. And just occasionally, when the weather is clear, we can see the island’s low hills as smudges, hints and whispers, part of the long island chain on our western horizon.

And you took the children. What an adventure. I’d love to see the machair in high summer. It’s a national treasure, isn’t it. There is something magical about the abundances of flowering plants and other wildlife in those coastal habitats. 

I think our croft in somewhere between your mountainous woodland and the wildflower meadows of the Outer Hebrides. South Erradale lies in a flat valley overlooked by moorland and the high summits of Torridon. As you say, green homogeneity to the casual onlooker or visitor, but to me, especially here on Red River Croft, that’s far from the truth. 

For years I’ve noted what species appear when and where, marvelling at nature’s ability to restore, return and regrow. When orchids start appearing, I feel a childlike burst of excitement; it’s like opening a Christmas present, and then another and another. R has just said I do the same with all the other wildflowers too, so goodness knows what my reaction(s) would be if all our croft was machair.

That said, I am also hopping with joy watching our young trees grow. They were planted in drifts to mimic a natural wood with spaces and winding paths for the grandchildren. A vision of ancient woodland sits in my mind’s eye but it will be our grandchildren’s grandchildren who see the outcomes of this hard work. 

Isn’t it fascinating how the different physical geographies of the Highlands and Islands have influenced field size and shape, land management and the way in which communities co-operate. Crofts here are simple five-acre squares. Red River Croft is made up of two — ten acres bisected by the River Erradale. Our house sits on one of two high fluvial terraces overlooking flatter flood meadows. Almost all South Erradale lies on an ancient estuary atop substrate made of sands, gravels and rock cobbles. Mid-Holocene sea-level was some 35m above the present-day High-Water Mark (HWM) but as the Highlands readjusted and rebounded without the great weight of ice, the HWM has fallen relative to land. For the last 6000 years the river has carved out an array of embankments and terraces. Ancient meanders can be seen on satellite imagery and some of the old maps look like the front cover of Robert Macfarlane’s latest book, Is a River Alive?. This complicated geomorphology means we have a range of habitat types on the croft — steep slopes, flood meadows, peats, scrub and woodland. A beautiful complexity of micro-environments enabling an even more beautiful entanglement of wildlife. Far from plain green and boring.

Most Erradale crofts are flat grazed meadows so I love the untidy topography of Red River Croft and the fact it enables such richness and diversity. It’s how I imagine Highland landscapes of old — swathes of dense forest interspersed with scrub and open flower-filled clearings. And it is how I imagine our tiny bit of woodland in the deep and distant future. A Red River Croft time warp. Future past. Full of species. And, according to my grandchildren, full of magic, a place where fairies roam. 

We don’t have cows but some come to graze from time to time. They’re good browsers and can tackle the whins happily. A mixture of animals — sheep, Highland ponies, pigs and cows — visit for short spells of ‘mob’ grazing. This mobbing has transformed our croft from close-cropped billiard table baize to luxuriant, species-rich abundance and ultimately to good traditional hay. Over the last few years, we have ‘borrowed’ animals for a few weeks at a time through autumn and winter. Because they all graze in a slightly different way, their relative impacts have added to the mixture of plants. We have seen new species arrive and thrive. Transformation and biodiversity governed by teeth, tongues and hooves.

The cattle belong to the Mackenzie boys – young crofters from the next township who also come to cut our hay with their father’s ancient but nimble tractor and gear. Big machinery used on greater acreages cannot cope with the unusual layout of our hay meadows. The cows are smallish, red or black Angus, feisty and too temperamental for me, but they’re loved by the Mackenzie lads. I know Dexters – they’re much more placid, pretty too. My Irish family had them in the past. I am even more familiar with Belted Galloways. My English grandfather kept them. When he returned from the trenches in World War I he went to a farm in Dumfries where he learned about cattle until he got a tenancy of his own in Lancashire. Like Dexters, Belties are good browsers. They are hardy, small and nimble, good for poor ground. I see more and more being utilised for conservation and rewilding purposes now, something my Grandpa would have liked.

R and I were tempted to have animals on the croft when we first started out but we didn’t and don’t have any skills in husbandry. Fate and happenstance led us to form partnerships with local crofters who do have animals and now we have this almost symbiotic relationship which produces wonderful hay in exchange for their skills in cutting, tedding and baling. 

I’m looking at our wee trees just now and thinking of your woodland and mossy riches. Perhaps some of your tree babies would thrive here? I turn around to the hay meadows sprinkled with orchid blooms. There’s another eight weeks or more of growing to go until the boys come to cut. But for all the world the fields look like the machair of Uist. 

With love from Wester Ross,

Ax

*

Kirsteen Bell is a Scottish writer of narrative non-fiction and sometimes poetry. All her words are gathered from the croft in Lochaber where she lives, and the surrounding Scottish Highlands. Her writing and reviews can be found in such places as Paperboats, Caught by the River, The Guardian Country Diary, The Lochaber Times, and Northern Scotland Journal. Kirsteen can also be found at Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre, where she is Projects Manager and Highland Book Prize Co-ordinator. 

Annie Worsley is a writer, crofter, grandmother and geographer with an enduring love of the Scottish Highlands. In 2013 she and her husband moved to the crofting township of South Erradale near Gairloch. While her husband was a community pharmacist, Annie worked on Red River Croft. She began a blog about life on the croft and then wrote essays on nature and environment for various publications including Elementum Journal, Women on Nature, the Seasons’ Anthologies edited by Melissa Harrison, Caught by the River and Inkcap Journal. Her first book about life on Red River Croft and the natural history of Wester Ross, ‘Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands’, was published by William Collins in 2023, and is out now in paperback.