Balcary Bay

Let me tell you about one of my favourite short walks – the Balcary Bay circular on the Kircudbrightshire coast.

Starting from the car park at the Balcary House Hotel, it is about 5 km in total, although you can lengthen it or shorten it slightly with minor variations to the route.  If you take the bus to Auchencairn, you will need to add another 3km along the very pleasant country road along Auchencairn Bay, with its estuary views and leafy gardens.

The route itself is a mixture of coastal farmland, rocky coves and a climb up and along the crags from Airds Point, where there are spectacular views down onto the sheer rocks with their seabirds, out far to sea and over to uninhabited Hestan Island that sits in the estuary like a stray piece of jigsaw.

Heading west from the hotel through the farmland as the pipits call, the first landmark I look for is Loch Mackie, sitting on the edge of the woodland.

Water has always fascinated me, especially the mystery of a newly discovered venue.  Passing through the swing gate directly ahead, you can walk right along the southern shore of the loch.  In summer, the vegetation is lush.  Butterflies and dragonflies flit over the edge of the loch between the overhanging trees.

If you walk on you notice you are walking along a small dam wall.  Clearly Loch Mackie has been man made, the dam creating a shallow loch from a previous small pond or wetland.  “But why was it made?” is the question I have often pondered.

Maybe it was for agricultural purposes – to create a cattle drink, a source of power, or a fishery?  I spent some time once watching for fish to rise to small crumbs of bread, but nothing did.  So far, the loch has just stared back at me, inscrutable.

It is possible to continue along this path into the woodlands and down to Rascarrel. I think there are better woodland walks around these parts, so I usually double back to a style that leads across the scrubland and down to the sea. My sense of wellbeing increases going down this track, as the aspect slowly opens between gorse and conifer to reveal the slate grey Solway horizon. You need to look twice sometimes to realise it's the sea and not some vast tarmac road.

A sea breeze reinforced with the tang of seaweed sweeps past the corner of the forest as the rocky bay comes into view, instantly clearing my lungs and mind.

Round where the path joins the coast there are a series of wooden holiday cottages.  One jauntily sports a pirate flag. Unaccountably as there seems to be no approach road, there are cars parked outside.  For a while, there is a mowed grass path next to the beach.  Look right here and you can make out the form of the Isle of Man.

This is not a declared nature walk, but the stretch of coastline to Balcary Point has provided me with more sightings in a couple of miles than anywhere else I could name.  The path swinging round behind the cottages can be so studded with painted ladies and other butterflies you have to take care not to stand on them.  The scrub bushes immediately behind them gave me my first view of a whitethroat, which tried unsuccessfully to hide as I fumbled for my binoculars.

Once, scavenging further westwards along the coast towards Rascarrel, I started to hear birdcalls like the sound from a series of rusty gate hinges.  Most of the birds were high in the conifers but one individual perched conveniently in a smaller tree right next to the path, so that I could see it was a redpoll.

I’m no great expert on plants, but primroses and violets apparently abound up on the cliffs in the other direction and those with more educated eyes can see exotics such as the spotted orchid and birdsfoot trefoil. More focussed on the antics of a stonechat, who is trying to convince his mate and offspring that he really is the business, I can only say there are a lot of flowers.

The path leads on over a cove of large stones that is clearly beachcombing country.  At its end was a fallen tree brought up by the tide and artistically decked out with all kinds of flotsam – presumably the work of children or an adventurous art class on a bright evening.  After passing over duckboards through a morasse of head-high rushes*, you start to climb gently up, leaving a causeway of eroded rocks cratered with pools to your right.

The Cliffs at Balcary Bay

From the top you have the first panorama over the cliffs, looking almost vertically down to where the cormorants and guillemots fish perhaps a hundred yards below.  The cormorants must have already filled their gullets today and spend most of the time resting on the low outcrops that jut out above sea level.  In June this whole area is a nest site, a frenzy of squawking activity.  Now it is quiet, and the eye drifts out to the far Cumbrian coast, and the first stirrings of a massive offshore windfarm.  A fellow walker tells me she saw a porpoise washed up on the shore further back.

The drystone wall running along the cliff head is good for birdlife too.  This is where I saw my first wheatear, smaller and longer-legged than I had anticipated.  On the same day, I spent half an hour on my stomach, peering through a gap in the wall, trying to work out whether the bird of prey perched further down was a merlin or a kestrel.  Never did quite get to the bottom of that one…

After a couple of hundred yards a small gully splits the clifftop. Here you have the option of heading back across the farmland, or continuing higher with even more spectacular views over exotically named rocks like ‘Adam’s Chair’ and ‘Lot’s Wife’. At Balcary Point the path sweeps slowly round and down the lip of the estuary.  Just before the old lighthouse the first signs of civilisation appear and it is not far back to the Balcary House Hotel.

It is very possible that Robert Burns will have visited Balcary – not to seek inspiration but in his capacity as a reluctant customs officer.  The whole area was a hotbed of smuggling.  Stories abound of secret passages beneath the Hotel and hidden coves exploited by the likes of Dirk Hatteraick, of bands of wild countrywomen intimidating outnumbered excisemen who vainly tried to separate them from their booty.

A particularly poignant story surrounds ‘The Manksman’s Grave’ at nearby Colvend.  A young Manx couple planning marriage decided to cover the wedding expenses by smuggling salt up the Solway, by some accounts on the very eve of the ceremony.  Intercepted by a naval cutter off Balcary, the boat ran for the shore.  On landing the groom was killed by a shot from the cutter and died on the beach.  The bride and her family later sailed to Scotland to recover the body of her lover, only to perish when the boat sank in a violent storm off Hestan Island.  There seems to be no record of their names.

There is no hint of such violent events to break the stillness as I stroll along the picturesque Urr estuary.  If you look out from Balcary today and see something breaking the waves, it won’t be the keel of some old smuggler’s ketch.  It’ll be a dolphin or a porpoise, or just possibly an emerging pile for the new windfarm.

*On a later visit I noticed the rush bed had been completely cut down.

August 2008