Additional information
Terrain
- Clearly waymarked footpaths and established tracks, may be muddy and slippery in places
Landscape
- Dramatic cliff tops and lonely lighthouse
Dog friendliness
- Keep on lead in nature reserve and by cliffs
Parking
- At NTS Nature Centre
Toilets en route
- At NTS Nature Centre
About the walk
St Abb's Head is one of those places that people forget to visit. You only ever seem to hear it mentioned on the shipping forecast – and its name is generally followed by a rather chilly outlook, along the lines of 'northeasterly five, continuous light drizzle, poor'. In fact, you could be forgiven... for wondering if it even exists or is simply a mysterious expanse of sea, like Dogger, Fisher or German Bight. Cliff dwellers But St Abb's Head does exist, as you'll find out on this lovely windswept walk, which will rumple your hair and leave the salty tang of the sea lingering on your lips. The dramatic cliffs, along which you walk to reach the lonely lighthouse, form an ideal home for thousands of nesting seabirds as they provide superb protection from mammalian predators. Birds you might spot on this walk include guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes, herring gulls, shags and fulmars – as well as puffins. Guillemots and razorbills are difficult to differentiate, as they're both black and white, and have an upright stance – rather like small, perky penguins. However, you should be able to spot the difference if you've got binoculars as razorbills have distinctive blunt beaks. Both birds belong to the auk family, the most famous member of which is probably the great auk, which went the way of the dodo and became extinct in 1844 – a victim of the contemporary passion for egg collecting. Luckily no egg collector could scale these cliffs, which are precipitous and surrounded by treacherous seas. Do this walk in the nesting season (May to July) and you may well see young birds jumping off the high cliff ledges into the open sea below. Even though they can't yet fly, as their wings are little more than stubs, the baby birds are nevertheless excellent swimmers and have a better chance of survival in the water than in their nests, where they could fall prey to marauding gulls. Neither razorbills nor guillemots are particularly agile in the air, but they swim with the ease of seals, using their wings and feet to propel and steer their sleek little bodies as they fish beneath the waves. Low life While the steep cliffs are home to most of the seabirds round St Abb's Head, the low, flat rocks below are also used by wildlife, as they are the favoured nesting site of shags. These all-black birds are easily distinguishable from their relative, the cormorant, by their distinctive crest. They also lack the cormorant’s white throat patch. They tend to fly low over the water, in contrast to the graceful fulmars that frequently soar along the cliff tops as you walk, hitching a ride on convenient currents of air.
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