June 19th

The storms of last winter may have reclaimed many bits of the managed coastal path, but what they have left is not a disaster. The cliff slippage at West Braes is an example. A small diversion for us, but now a piece of wild cliff habitat, with wildflowers, small copper butterflies, burnet moths, sedge warblers and whitethroats breeding, and along the exposed soily top of the cliff, sand martins. In fact sand martins are everywhere along the coast from Elie to St Andrews this year, digging their burrows in the sandy soil banks exposed by the erosion. Many of the generation born in the 1940s and 1950s finds this kind of habitat change disturbing – the world is to be managed, controlled and tidied – and creeping wildness is just the first step to barbarism. But those born in the 1920s and 1930s, or before, if any were still alive, don’t think this way. Wild places and nature were a loved part of the landscape: part of a childhood where there were natural spaces and freedom to enjoy them. As for the generations born in the 1960s and 1970s, there is still a legacy of the emergent tidiness culture post-war (who can escape the influence of their parents entirely), but many of us grew up with Greenpeace and David Attenborough, so there is an underlying fondness for wild nature. And the generations since then – hopefully they get that tidiness – nature taming/destruction for the sake of order – is just a cultural blip of mid-last century. There are no real advantages to strimming a grass verge, cutting a meadow, stripping off ivy, concreting a cliff – it is just cultural excess baggage, that none of us can afford. Have a walk along the top of West Braes and have a look at the nature that happens when we just let it go (literally).

New wild habitat at West Braes

Sand martins exploiting a newly exposed earth face – not at West Braes – a bit inadvisable to go close there. But you can watch the sand martins closely when they are hawking over the grass by the path