It’s getting towards the end of the summer and it feels important, amongst the hecticness of our hyperscale data centre campaign, to spend some time in nature. Here Kat revisits one of her favourite places – The Lynn of Lorn National Scenic Area.
Many people will have first come across the Lynn of Lorn National Scenic Area (NSA) while photographing a perfectly positioned lighthouse from the ferry heading out from Oban to Tiree and Coll, or to Barra. The lighthouse in question is just off the southernmost tip of the Isle of Lismore and is framed perfectly by the mountains of Morven, Ben Nevis and Cruachan, from left to right in the shot. The photographer is at sea but surrounded on all sides by land: Mull, Morvern, Lismore and the deeply incised coast of Argyll. At the centre of this landscape, sliced apart by glaciers 10,000 years ago, sits the Lynn of Lorn NSA.
Lynn of Lorn is nationally important for its biodiversity as well as its scenic qualities. The NSA is within a Marine Protected Area, and contains three Special Areas of Conservation (SACs), a designation recognising a habitat of national, and even European, importance.
At Loch Creran the oak and hazel woodlands grow right down to the shoreline. This is one of Scotland’s scarcest habitats, Atlantic oak woodland, our very own rainforest. But underneath the water an even rarer forest grows, the serpulid reef. Below the reflection of the oaks on the still surface, tube worms are extending their canopies from miniature trunks rooted to rocks on the steep sided loch. The Loch Creran SAC serpulid reef is absolutely unique in the UK, and by far the most abundant reef of its type in Europe. However all is not well, despite the area also being a Marine Protected Area, the latest assessment is that the reef is in ‘unfavourable declining’ condition.
What is it that makes this landscape so beautiful and so biodiverse? Like an iceberg, the submerged landscape dwarfs that above water forming channels and cliffs and pairing shallow mud bays and estuaries with deep fjord-like lochs. The human brain loves complexity – babies stare at more complex patterns for longer, and complexity is perhaps what makes the Firth of Lorn both so scenic and so biodiverse. The intricacy of the coastline holds true whatever scale you look at it, we are looking at a fractal landscape.
If you were to zoom in, as if from a satellite, the coastline resolves into bays and deep lochs cut through the landscape. Focusing in further, we see a person scrambling along the shoreline, she crosses a narrow muddy beach contained by rocky promontories and clambers around a craggy inlet. The woman stops beside a child crouched at a tidal pool on the rocky shore, playing in a landscape of miniature coves and bays, each one stippled with barnacles clinging to the rock. Every magnification of scale reveals no less complexity than the ones that went before. The next scale down – the texture of the barnacle surface, the crystals within a quartzite vein in the bedrock, would need a hand lens.
As well as making this landscape a place of beauty, where every turn of the head brings a new revelation, the fractal nature of the coastline has created a myriad of habitats. The topography creates microclimates and idiosyncratic tidal currents, countless hiding places for creatures of all sizes, and an interaction of the freshwater with the marine as rivers and burns meet the sea.
Did I mention the light? Sea and sky, mica glinting in the schists. Clouds glowing from inside out with the blinding glare of the June sun on the sea. Storms rolling up the loch past Lismore, sea suddenly dark where rain hammers down, trailing brightness behind. Even a rainbow.
The communities of Appin, Benderloch and Lismore, like the landscape, live between land and sea. Livelihoods past, and many in the present, depend on this interplay between sea and land, farming and fishing. Human influence in the landscape of the NSA goes back thousands of years: the site of a crannog in the sound of Eriska remains as a roost for black headed gulls at high tide; prehistoric cairns dot the high ground of Lismore.
Returning to the ferry in the Sound of Mull, the photographer squints beyond the lighthouse. Practically every bump and piece of raised ground visible on Lismore is marked on the map as a ‘Dun’, an iron age fort. The south end of Lismore was extravagantly fortified, eight forts, a castle and a broch are marked on the present day map, and the medieval cathedral of the island was home to the powerful Bishops of Argyll. When the sea served as the main highway, Lorn was at the core, a centre of power – dominating, as it does, three key sea passages.
Over the centuries power waned and, by today’s standards, Lorn could be seen as peripheral, a remote backwater. But spend some time here, between glinting rock and sparkling sea, and you will know that it is you who stand at the dead centre, as the rest of the world, unimaginably remote, turns about you.
Kat Jones
