The Cheviot - 5/6/2019

With my trip to Northumbria reaching the second full day, and having already visited the Farnes, my attention moved to other parts of the area. As a resident of Suffolk, a relatively flat land, I really wanted to climb a mountain, and  being ambitious decided to climb the highest mountain in the area.
The Cheviot rises above the mountains that make up Northumbria, England's least populated and most mysterious national park. It has little of the pizazz of the Lake District or the Yorkshire Dales is more understated, whilst still managing to have great scenery.
Being suck a low key area it took us a while to find the car park and the route up, and so we ended up arriving around midday. I was walking with two other people who weren't interested in bird watching in any shape or form, so I didn't have the chance to stop as much as I would have liked, which in the end was a bonus, as it took a long time to walk, even at normal pace.
The first leg of the journey took us up a river valley where some birders we met along the way, pointed out a RING OUZEL, in a patch of bracken. This is the first time I've seen this species on its breeding haunts, I usually catch up with it on migration along the coast, so it was a real bonus, what I was hoping to see. There were also several STONECHAT in the lowland areas of heath, and as the trees thinned out WILLOW WARBLER were singing. The bubbling call of the CURLEW carried on the wind, no doubt some pair nesting in a boggy area of land.

 

Gradually as we made our way up, the landscape changed to open heather moorland, more of a wilderness, and in this area we flushed several family parties of RED GROUSE, with young. There were several shooting butts in the area, and gritting posts, which indicated the area was managed as a grouse shooting place, as is so much of our mountain tops.
The hardest climb was right at the end, a massive slog up three hundred metres, at a high gradient, which coming from Suffolk, where we have no such slopes, was very difficult. At this point the area became very boggy, with little areas of water cutting across the path, meaning we had to jump over a little stream every so often, really knackering the legs. At the top the area became more boggy and we discovered a couple of GOLDEN PLOVER, they were often silhouetted against the sky on a piece of heather, emitting their haunting call that really added to the wilderness of the mountain summit. These birds that winter down  in the lowlands spend the summer up in boggy mountainous areas, and their summer plumage of golden back and black belly is sublime.

 

The top was a plateau, and there was low cloud so there weren't many views. We had our lunch on the only sign of civilisation, a trig point, and made our way down.
The downslope path was a lot more treacherous. The path followed the river down, which meant constantly having to cross and recross the river, jumping from stone to stone when doing so. It was like this for quite a while, until the land became more flat and there was more space to follow the river on one bank.

Down at this point we saw some upland river birds like DIPPER and GREY WAGTAIL, saw a few more lowland STONECHATS, a REED BUNTING, and gradually we saw more signs of civilisation, until we eventually found the road and the car.
It was a long journey, it took around five hours, with all the steep slopes and obstacles, although we hadn't travelled far. It was a nice, picturesque walk, and coming from Suffolk that's what I wanted, to see a more remote area of country, and above all mountain birds.