Head to the sandy coastlines of Scotland and Ireland to enjoy a dazzling diversity of wildflowers
Mike Dilger’s WILDLIFE SPECTACLES
MACHAIR IN BLOOM
Coming from the Gaelic for a fertile, low-lying grassy plain, ‘machair’ describes a rare coastal habitat, famed not only for its plentiful bird life in spring but also its beautiful array of wildflowers throughout summer. Covering a total area of just 19,000ha globally, machair is not just one of the rarest habitat types in Britain, but also right across Europe. It can only be found along a few exposed Atlantic-facing coasts in north-west Scotland and Ireland, with the majority concentrated along the western shores of the Outer Hebrides, Tiree and Coll.
Machair grassland usually sits alongside white sandy beaches and among sand dunes, and will even merge into marshes as it stretches inland. It began to form in earnest at the end of the last age and was subsequently maintained by human influences in the form of low-intensity farming – or crofting.
With the retreat of the glaciers, sand was deposited on the seabed before becoming mixed with huge quantities of crushed shells from marine molluscs. As the sea levels rose, the sand and shell fragments were driven ashore by strong southwesterly winds to form the distinctive white beaches where machair grows. This mixture of ground-down shells and sand was then steadily blown up the beach, forming small dunes in the process, before being blasted even further inland to form lime-rich pastures. Often containing a shell content of anywhere between 20 to 80 per cent, this calcareous quality distinguishes machair sand from the yellower sand deposited on the ‘links’ of Scotland’s eastern coasts, which possess a far higher silica content.
The machair’s dune flora mostly consists of a specialised cadre of salt-tolerating sand-colonisers, such as sea sandwort, sea rocket and marram grass. But the impacts of the wind and salt-spray quickly reduce behind the dunes, allowing for a more stable terrain and further floral diversity. These flower-rich pastures have been preserved by a combination of light cattle-grazing (to maintain an open sward), rotational crop-farming and hay cutting – all of which have played an integral part in Gaelic culture for at least 1,500 years. Kelp is collected from the strandline and applied as a natural fertiliser to this day.
Pastures can still appear desolate as late as May because of the northerly latitudes in which machair is located, b
