Tag: Gaelic

A mountain pass — the low point between two summits, the place where the ridge dips and a path crosses from one valley to another. In the Scottish Highlands, bealachs are the ancient routes between glens.

A wetland characterized by acidic, waterlogged peat soil, fed primarily by rainfall rather than groundwater or streams. Bogs are nutrient-poor, oxygen-poor, and slow — everything in them grows slowly, decays slowly, and changes slowly. The dominant plant is sphagnum moss, which creates its own acidity and its own waterlogging, engineering the conditions for its own survival. Bogs are found across the northern latitudes — Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia, Russia, Canada — and in tropical highlands. They are eerie, beautiful, treacherous, and among the most important carbon stores on earth.

Gaelic for a general boggy area on the moor — the common, expected wetness of peatland, as distinct from the more dangerous forms.

Gaelic for sucking bog disguised by alluringly bright green grass — the most dangerous kind. The bright green that covers it is a lure; the ground beneath will swallow you. The Hebridean moor path-makers cairned their routes specifically to avoid breunlach.

 A mound of stacked stones, built by human hands for any of a dozen purposes — marking a trail, commemorating the dead, indicating a summit, claiming territory, honoring a place, or simply because stacking stones is one of the oldest human impulses. Cairns range from knee-high trail markers to massive Bronze Age burial mounds. They are found on every continent where there are rocks and people.

The largest grouse in the world — a forest bird the size of a turkey, with iridescent green-black plumage and a red brow. Driven to extinction in Scotland in the 18th century by deforestation and hunting, then reintroduced from Swedish stock. Its courtship display involves clicking, popping, and a sound like a cork being pulled from a bottle.

A deep, bowl-shaped hollow carved by glaciers into a mountainside — an amphitheater of rock, often holding a dark lochan at its floor. Corries are where snow lingered longest, where ice gnawed the mountain from the inside. The plural form in Scotland names some of the wildest places: the Corries of the Cairngorms.

 An elongated, teardrop-shaped hill of glacial till, sculpted by the movement of ice over it. The steep end faces upstream (toward the advancing glacier); the tapered end trails downstream. Drumlins rarely occur alone — they appear in fields of dozens or hundreds, aligned like a fleet of half-buried ships all pointing the same direction. Their topography is sometimes called "basket of eggs."

 A long, narrow, sinuous ridge of sand and gravel deposited by a meltwater stream flowing in a tunnel beneath or within a glacier. When the ice melts away, the stream's sediment load is left behind as a winding raised track across the landscape — a fossil riverbed, elevated and inverted. Eskers can run for miles, often through otherwise flat terrain, and have been used as natural roadways for centuries.

A narrow valley, typically with steep sides — the space between mountains, where the burn runs and the path follows. In Scotland, glens are named and known like people: Glen Coe, Glen Affric, Glen Lyon.

A lake, especially one set in mountains — darker and deeper than the English word implies. A loch has depth and mood. The water is peat-stained, the shores are heather, and the surface holds the sky like a mirror that remembers everything.

A small loch — a tarn, a mountain pool, often lying in a corrie or on a high plateau. Lochans are the eyes of the mountain, each one reflecting a different patch of sky.

The low-lying, shell-sand grassland of the Hebridean and western Scottish coast — fertile, flower-rich, wind-scoured. Formed by millennia of shell fragments blown inland and broken down into calcareous soil. One of the rarest and most biodiverse habitats in Europe.

A grouse of the high plateau that changes its plumage to white in winter — invisible against snow, visible against everything else. Ptarmigan nest high, eat heather buds, and are among the few birds that stay on the mountain year-round.

 The shadows of clouds moving across the moorland on a sunny day. The landscape darkening and brightening in slow, silent waves as the sky passes over it.

A wide, flat river valley — broader and gentler than a glen, with room for farmland along the river. The big valleys of the Highlands: Strathspey, Strathmore, Strath Naver.