Gentle east coast wander brings me a glimpse of gold amongst the grey

The sea keeps creeping up on me. Nothing to do with rising ocean levels and melting polar ice caps, but rather with my state of mind. In the last two or three years, my naturewriting instincts have begun to incline towards the coast. I have always liked the sea and a disproportionate amount of my writing life has been preoccupied by the Hebridean west and the Northern Isles.

But the sea I feel drawn towards now is the one I grew up with, the more or less island-free North Sea coast.

I mentioned last week that a simplification of my writing had become something of a quest and how Mctaggart’s painting, The Wave, had seemed to encapsulate something of what I am looking for. That idea extends to the landscape itself. The landscape of the east coast is one of simplicities.

The land approaches the sea in easy slopes and coastal plains, not thronged with wading mountains like the west. And all Scotland’s great rivers flow this way so the coast is bitten by their firths.

In other words, it is water that gives the east coast its essential character. And the absence of mountains and islands also encourages a deeper appreciation of the sky. Water and sky – the great simplicities.

Something of all this was rummaging around in my head on a gentle wander along the Fife Coastal Path between Elie and St Monans. Stirling had been relentless rain, but within a few eastward miles, there was a glimmer of sunrise that fired up the south-facing Ochils escarpment with vivid shades of autumn.

But Fife was a shroud, fog in every imaginable shade of grey. This, I muttered to myself, could last for hours, for days.

But then, south-east of Cupar, somewhere between the Peat Inn and Kilconquhar, the sky burst open, there was the sudden sea, the May in sunlight and the Bass a silhouette with a blaze of bright white sunlight to show it off. Old friends-inlandscape, the familiar welcome mat.

With the tide well out, the detail was in the foreshore, a mosaic of dark, seaweedrobed rock hemming in patches of sand and tidal pools of every shape and size, from wee dubs to lochans and against the low sun these were white fire or yellow fire.

If you are intrigued by the over-wintering tribes of migrating birds (and for me these are a significant part of what the lure of the east coast at this time of year is all about), then this is where you should be. You hear them before you see them, the loud ones that is, oystercatchers, curlews, lapwings, redshanks. Mostly, these are natives, down from inland, uphill nesting grounds.

But what I’m really hoping for is the ones that gather in silence, unless you see them flying in, when their flight calls can turn the head: the golden plovers and the grey plovers. There is a superficial resemblance and sometimes they hang out together along east coast shores. But their stories are very different.

Golden plovers nest on our hills and moors, though not in any great numbers, and their nesting voices are the soundtrack of so many lonely places. I always think of Marion Campbell’s poem, Levavi Oculus from her exquisite book, Argyll – The Enduring Heartland:

“And there, the very edge of magic, whistling liquidly,

“The golden, golden plover wheel and go…”

On a late autumn Fife shore, however, Scottish birds will often be joined by migrating flocks from Iceland.

Golden plovers, even shorn of their summer finery of gold and black and white to while away the dark months (we all dress down for winter), have the capacity to cheer the heart and lumpen the thrapple. We all have our favourites and there is no accounting for them.

But grey plovers don’t nest here and they belong to that cast of super-migrants who find their way here in the autumn from Siberia and still manage to meet up with their golden kin on scraps of shoreline like this one. They too shed their breeding finery for drab shades of anonymity.

The grey and the golden scatter fragments of the Arctic across these shores and as one thirled to the far north, it’s a good day for me whenever our paths cross.

My hopes for that stretch of Fife shore that day were cautious, uncertain what impact avian flu will have wrought on the migrant hordes. And when I saw a biggish gathering of birds around a tidal pool my first thought was curlews.

But once I found the flock in the binoculars they proved to be golden plovers and there were 300 of them.

Not a grey plover in sight that day, which is not the same thing as saying there were none there.

The sea keeps creeping up on me. This is one of the reasons why.

It is the water that gives the east coast its essential character

FAVOURITE FLOCK : Golden plovers, even without their distinctive summer plumage, are a delightful spot at this time of year.