Читать книгу The Isles of Scilly - Rosemary Parslow - Страница 58

The island of Gugh might be described as the sixth inhabited island, but it is usually included with St Agnes. At low tide you can cross the Bar – a sand bar, strictly a tombolo – from one island to the other. Immediately at the end of the Bar is a small area of dune and dune grassland merging into the maritime grassland fringe around the island. A dense edge of sea-holly Eryngium maritimum marks the dune edge and both sea and Portland spurge are found here with sea bindweed and other coastal plants. The grass bank at the top of the Bar is one of the few places where wild thyme grows; earlier in the year western clover and early meadow-grass are also abundant here. This is another beach where the lesser cockroach has been found. The majority of the island is wind-pruned waved heath or dense gorse and bracken, with maritime grassland around the coastal fringe and on the north and southwest of the island. The summit of Gugh

FIG 54. Named after islander Obadiah Hicks is Obadiah’s Barrow, an entrance grave on Gugh, half hidden among foxgloves and wall pennywort. June 2003. (Rosemary Parslow)

is remarkable for the number of archaeological remains that are still visible: on top of the hills that form the spine of the island are a series of Bronze Age barrows, remnants of walls and a standing stone known as the Old Man of Gugh. Another well-known barrow, Obadiah’s Barrow, lies among dense gorse on the side of the hill (Fig. 54). For a small island there is an extensive list of rare and unusual plants, lichens and invertebrates.

The former Gugh farm occupies the central area just north of the neck across the middle of the island, between the two heathy hills that make up the body of the island. Two houses now stand there; they were built by a Mr Cooper in about 1920 and they have strange curved concrete roofs, like upturned boats, designed to withstand gales (Fig. 55). When Cooper died he was buried on the island. On the east coast of Gugh is a bay with dazzling white sand called Dropnose Porth. This curious name occurs elsewhere in Scilly, so maybe this is a humorous, descriptive reference to a nearby rock. Many of the granite carns and rocks have been eroded into fantastic shapes. There is a rock near Kittern Hill at the north end of Gugh that, seen from the sea, appears to have been sculpted into a likeness of Queen Victoria – though from a slightly different angle it becomes a Red Indian brave!

The sandy neck between the two hills formed from blown sand has an unusual flora. Growing among the bracken beside the path are dog roses Rosa

FIG 55. The tide just covering the Bar (strictly a tombolo) from St Agnes to Gugh, November 2002. (Rosemary Parslow)

canina and an unidentified yellow rose (presumed an escape from cultivation). Balm-leaved figwort is very common here, despite not being found elsewhere on the island. Another plant found in this vicinity is the alien Argentine dock Rumex frutescens. This grows on the edge of the abandoned sand pit, originally dug as a reservoir. In the field below the Gugh houses from about 1933 viper’s-bugloss Echium vulgare, wild mignonette Reseda lutea and common melilot Melilotus officinalis were found, although not all have been seen recently. Their presence in the field has been attributed to the use of shoddy (a high-nitrate manure deriving from the wool industry) before 1933. In the 1960s this neck area was close-cropped grassy sward, a good place to find mushrooms, where thousands of garden tiger Arctia caja caterpillars would swarm and cuckoos Cuculus canorus would arrive to feed on them, and where wheatears would also appear on passage (J. Parslow, in litt.). When myxomatosis reduced the rabbit population, the neck became overgrown with brambles and bracken, and the open turf and the grass tennis court that was there all disappeared from view (W. Hick, personal communication).

Along the top of Gugh, just above Obadiah’s Barrow, there was a heath fire in October 1972 that burned down through the shallow peat soil to the granite. As a result recovery has been slow and even now traces of the fire can still be seen, in blackened stems of gorse and bleached rocks. There have also been changes in the vegetation: yellow bartsia Parentucellia viscosa, for example, became very common in the burnt area and for a time English stonecrop and bird’s-foot-trefoil were dominant plants on the bare ground. Elsewhere heathland extends along the crest of the island, both north and south of the ‘neck’. Sometimes the rare orange bird’s-foot can be found on one of the larger carns in the southern half of the island. Here too are extensive colonies of lesser black-backed gulls Larus fuscus, herring gulls L. argentatus and a few great black-backed gulls L. marinus. It is wise to avoid the gull colonies during the breeding season, as the gulls are likely to ‘dive-bomb’ people who approach too close to their nests, and can be very intimidating.

Small adder’s-tongue fern has been found on at least one place on Gugh in the past, but has now not been seen for about a decade. This is not unusual with this group of ferns, so it could reappear again if conditions are suitable. Other rarities, for example golden hair-lichen, certain invertebrates and migrant birds are found on Gugh, just as they are on St Agnes. Manx shearwater and storm petrel Hydrobates pelagicus no longer breed, but on dark nights the shearwaters may still be heard revisiting their former haunts. For many years there has been a colony of kittiwakes under the cliffs, but recently the colony seems to have moved elsewhere.

Other than rabbits, there are now no grazing animals on Gugh. Cuckoo, the little donkey described by Leslie Thomas (1968), and Demelza the house cow both left in 1974. Cloven-hoofed animals failed to thrive on Gugh due to cobalt deficiencies in the soil, and the animals had to be given supplements (W. Hick, in litt.). Gradually the sandy neck area largely scrubbed over and there is no longer the wide swathe of short grassland that was there in the 1960s. Other farming projects since then have failed, so there are abandoned bulb and asparagus fields which have gone back to dense bracken, but where a flush of daffodils or wisps of asparagus fern still appear in season. Some of the abandoned bulb fields on the farm still have remnant hedges and, where the rabbits have been digging, some of the arable plants, along with both common and orange bird’s-foot, may reappear.

Cuckoo the donkey is a reminder that of all places in Scilly, Gugh often used to have the largest and noisiest population of cuckoos, apparently attracted by the extraordinary numbers of garden tiger and other large caterpillars found there some years. They would fly over the island and the Cove in spring in noisy display, their cuckooing echoing across the water until in the past some islander, driven demented by them, would take the law into his own hands and silence them with a shotgun.