In the towering walls of the canyon, the fissures and seams tell stories about the passing of geological time - each shift in the strata documents the birth and death of ancient seas and deltas, floodplains and forests. Hundreds of millions of years pass in the glance of an eye. Now, Willow Warblers and Redpolls sing from stunted spruces and willows on inaccessible ledges. Through the centre of the canyon runs a row of enormous, half-buried, upturned tyres that presumably once delineated a safe route for the trucks carrying coal away. They aren't needed anymore, but the sandpipers that buzz and reel back and forth from one shallow pool to another use them for song-posts.
A pair of Ringed Plover lead us away from a brood, making short darting runs and calling incessantly from one rock then another. At the far end of the canyon, a large body of water opens out - sandpipers flit back and forth from one gravel beach to another, and another pair of Ringed Plover scull around the edges, chasing each other with exaggerated, deep, slow wingbeats like a displaying Short-eared Owl on the moor. From one end of the canyon to the other, there must be five or six Common Sandpiper territories. Their calls echo against the walls, making it seem like there's twice as many again. High up on the sheer slopes, Wheatear fledglings flit. The floor of the void is scattered with orchids and wildflowers, and the spoils and tailings of the mine impoverish the soil such that the edges of the shallow pools remain muddy and unvegetated, perfect for waders to forage for insects.
Beyond the far end of the void, wind turbines spin and on a distant horizon trucks rumble back and forth filling in another former opencast site with sewage and compost to create fertile soils for tree planting.
There was once a town here before opencast mining came to Ayrshire. Glenbuck was a mining town too, but the shift from underground mining to opencast meant that it was sacrificed to make way for Spireslack, and the townsfolk were shunted down the road to a council estate in Muirkirk. Memories of life here are preserved by former residents. The most famous resident of all was Bill Shankly, Liverpool football club's greatest ever manager. There is a memorial covered in Liverpool scarves where his house once stood. A Sedge Warbler rasps out a half-hearted end of spring song from a meadow nearby as it strips a top-heavy Dock of seeds.
Just down from the memorial is a low-lying, flat stretch of boggy ground. Half of it is covered in Meadowsweet, but the other half has been cleared, cut and churned up, shallow channels running back and forth, lots of exposed mud and soggy, open ground. A Snipe skulks from one side of ditch to the other, and an Oystercatcher pair drop in. A Whinchat uses one of the corner posts as a song perch, periodically dropping down into the sodden newly mown areas to forage for insects. A Ringed Plover scampers, and a Lapwing calls insistently - an urgent, grating call that gives away that it has young nearby. You couldn't imagine better wader feeding habitat.
A hundred years ago this was a football pitch. The Glenbuck Cherrypickers FC were famous for providing Scottish International footballers, Bill Shankly among them. Inexplicably, fifty players from Glenbuck went on to become professional footballers, even though the population of the town was never more than a few thousand. There are four posts in that boggy piece of ground that demarcate the location of the pitch that the Glenbuck Cherrypickers used to play on. The Glenbuck community want to restore the football pitch and revive the football team - it turns out that it wasn't a NatureScot grant or a wader project officer that had created the perfect wader habitat - it was a result of an attempt to restore the football pitch to its former glories. They had tried to mow the vegetation short, and the tractor wheels had sunk deep into the bog as it went back and forth creating perfect channels for waders to feed and forage.
Understandably, the birds might not be uppermost in the decision-making process here, but Matt Cross, who showed me round the site, will try to delay further mowing of the football pitch to allow that Lapwing brood the best chance of fledging, and he should be able to recruit some forestry apprentices to clear the colonising Sitka from the void. In the longer term it isn't clear what the future holds: perhaps the circumstances that these birds are exploiting will prove to be fleeting, but for now at least they are a nice footnote to the story of the rise and fall of the Ayrshire coalfields, the lost village and the football pitch that sank into a bog.
Thanks to Matt Cross of the East Ayrshire Coalfield Environment Initiative, who was generous with his time and knowledge.
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