A short history of Scotland's lost species 3: The Crane

My next article (following on from those on the elk and bear) is on one of Scotland's missing birds - the Eurasian crane. We know from bones found in Orkney, the Western Isles, Moray, the Borders and Edinburgh that cranes were a part of Scotland's past fauna.

A migratory species that typically breeds in wetlands, cranes are big birds that stand well over a metre tall and produce large eggs. Both the eggs and the birds themselves would have been sought after by humans for food. Indeed, we know that cranes were eaten at feasts of King James V in the early 16th century, with records showing birds being procured from right across the southern half of Scotland. It's thought that overhunting and the drainage of wetland habitat ultimately pushed the species into extinction in Scotland. A flock of sixty cranes was recorded on the Isle of Skye in the late 17th century, and was possibly Scotland's last breeding flock.

There have been sightings in the Cairngorms National Park of one or two cranes in spring over the past few years, and it would be fantastic to see the crane back here as a breeding bird. Welcoming back large, charismatic wildlife, however, can be challenging if many people consider them to be new and exotic animals that really don't belong. There are no historical records of cranes from the Cairngorms, although suitable wetland habitat certainly exists.

There are, however, a couple of bits of interesting potential place name evidence from two wetland nature reserves within the national park. On the east side of the park, on the side of Loch Kinord in the Muir of Dinnet National Nature Reserve, there is a place called Bogingore. The original Gaelic name was Bogan Corra - which can be translated to 'little bog of crane'.

The other place name has quite a story associated with it! In the year 685 AD, the king of the Northumbrian Saxons, Ecgfrith, decided to move north and invade the Picts, his predecessors having already invaded Goddodin, a kingdom in what's now largely south eastern Scotland. According to the Northumbrian monk, Bede, who wrote about it 50 or so years later, the Pictish army fled north and Ecgfrith and his army gave chase though 'inaccessible mountains'. However, the Pictish retreat was a trap. Having lured Ecgfrith deep into Pictish territory they ambushed his army at the side of a lake and, in a battle known as Dún Nechtain (i.e. Nechtain's fort) in the Gaelic language (and Nechtansmere in English), Ecgfrith was killed and most of his army destroyed. This defeat put an end to the northwards expansion of the Northumbrian kingdom and preserved the Pictish culture for a couple more centuries.

The site of the battle was thought for a long time to have been at Dunnichen in lowland Angus, but this doesn't fit well with Bede's description of an invading army from the south having to pass through inaccessible mountains. There is also no obvious lake there. However, a more recent rival theory places the site of the battle at a place called Dunachton, the site of an old fort near the side of a lake, i.e. Loch Insh, in the Cairngorms National Park.

There is another old surviving reference to the Battle of Dún Nechtain, this time recorded by a Welsh monk called Nennius in the 9th century AD. He refers to the battle by its name in Old Welsh, Gueith Linn Garan. Old Welsh is what's known as a P-Celtic language (Gaelic is also a Celtic tongue but is more distantly related and is known as a Q-Celtic language). It's thought that the Picts spoke a P-Celtic language related to Welsh. For example, both Wales and northern Scotland have lots of 'Aber-' place names, meaning a river mouth, e.g. Aberystwyth and Abergavenny in Wales, and Aberdeen and Abernethy in Scotland. So the Welsh name for the battle is likely to closely mirror what the Picts themselves called it,

Why am I telling you all this? Well, Gueith Linn Garan can be translated as the 'Battle of Crane Lake'. And this not only potentially puts historical cranes on the west side of the national park very close to the Insh Marshes National Nature Reserve, but rather nicely ties the species in with a significant moment in Scottish history.

Today, the species has a precarious toehold in Scotland, with a couple of recolonising pairs breeding in Aberdeenshire for the past few summers. It will be fascinating to see if the crane's blaring trumpeting and spectacular courtship dance one day return to the Little Bog of Crane and to Crane Lake.