There was a coal tit’s nest in a broch. Think about it.
The nest. A perfect circle with an inner radius of about three inches; made from moss, lichen, feathers, grass, last year’s oak leaves, scraps of sheep’s wool, and is that a stray wisp of blue baler twine filched from the farm gate?
It was occupied by one very small sitting bird. Not that you could see it if you walked this way, for it is stashed away out of sight and only inches above the ground in a hole in the wall of…
…The broch. A perfect circle with an inner radius of more than 30 feet and a vast double wall about 18 feet thick made entirely of stone.
The walls still stand to a height of about eight feet, but somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago when it was built, it would have stood perhaps 50 feet tall, perhaps 60.
It was occupied by…no-one knows. We know nothing about who built the brochs.
We do know that they have been unoccupied for about 1,500 years now. What’s left of this one stands in a turned-aside place, a low but steep wooded slope with the flat, lush grass fields of the Lowlands to its south.
To its north lie very first upthrust of rougher fields that rise gently to culminate in the very first hint of foothills, then the first mountains, the frontier of the Highlands.
The wood is not large but it is richly diverse with oak, beech, Scots pine, rowan, ash, elm, lime, sycamore, alder, birch, holly, willow, hazel.
The broch is both spectacularly overgrown and screened by big trees, and approached by nothing more salubrious than a badger path.
From 50 yards away and from any direction, there is no hint that it exists but the broch and I are old friends.
What first lured me here is that I like to write in such turned-aside places. They are undisturbed, and for a nature writer, that is the be all and end all.
To see through nature’s eyes
With growing familiarity, the relationship evolved, and soon it was providing me with raw material as well as sanctuary.
My personal inventory of the wildlife I have encountered either in the wood or in the airspace above it is undocumented, untabulated, uncounted.
I have never kept records, lists, statistics, especially not statistics; I keep nature’s company to write it down, and I re-work the same set of circumstances again and again to try and write down nature’s eye-view of the place.
But in all those years, I never saw coal tits before.
But there they were, and they had built one perfect circle within another, a circle designed to house a single season and into which they laid eight eggs, each about three quarters of an inch by half an inch, off-white and blotched a deep tan colour.
My 1954 revised edition of the Observer’s Book of Birds’ Eggs (remember them?) states confidently: “Less varied in choice of nesting sites than either Great or Blue Tits, Coal Tits prefer natural sites…”
So that writer never knew about coal tits in a broch before either.
The sapling leaned out and drooped into the broch’s inner space. I paid no attention to it until it started to complain
The afternoon that I discovered them I had been sitting on a fallen piece of wall where the broch’s narrow entrance passage opened into the thickly overgrown inner sanctum.
I had begun to draw a kind of shorthand sketch, just the facing portion of wall, the lower part of the vast oak that stood beyond it, surviving fragments of built stone and the woodland that came many centuries later.
The wall was partly obscured by a lime sapling rooted in the thick fur of vegetation that sprouted from the top.
The sapling leaned out and drooped into the broch’s inner space. I had paid no attention to it at all until it started to complain.
This was a harsh, insistent, high-pitched voice, monotonous, monotone, monosyllabic, an emphatic, relentless crotchet that having begun, went on and on.
At first it added a kind of piquancy to the many-layered soundtrack of an early summer’s late afternoon. After five minutes it had become a pain.
Finally, when it had become intolerably distracting I looked up and gave it a hostile stare, only to find that I was already on the receiving end of just such a stare.
Both voice and stare belonged to a coal tit with its mouth full.
It was at that moment that I recognised the attitude of a bird discomfited by an alien presence far too near its nest for comfort.
I retreated as far as I could while keeping it in sight. The gesture was enough. At once it flew down almost to the bottom of the wall and dived inside through a crack about an inch wide between stones.
A minute later it was out again with its mouth empty, and power-climbed into the branches of a pair of Scots pines that towered over the broch.
And a week later there were eight fledglings on the lime sapling, as chaotic a group of creatures as you will ever see.
A coal tit’s nest in a broch…oh, the ridiculous miracle of the thing.