Things to do in Berwickshire

St Abb's Head on the Berwickshire coast of Scotland is a dramatic headland of volcanic rocks rising over 90 metres from the North Sea, a National Nature Reserve managed by the National Trust for Scotland whose seabird colony, the most important on the eastern Scottish coast south of the Firth of Forth, makes it one of the principal seabird watching locations in Scotland. The combination of the dramatic cliff scenery, the breeding seabirds and the clear water of the St Abbs marine reserve below makes this one of the finest coastal visits in the southeast of Scotland. The seabird colony supports over 50,000 breeding seabirds including guillemot, razorbill, kittiwake, fulmar, shag, herring gull and a small number of puffins, concentrated on the stack and cliff ledges that provide the characteristic Berwickshire cliff scenery. The guillemot and kittiwake colonies are the most numerous and the most vocal, their calls audible from a considerable distance, and the clifftop viewing points provide excellent observation of the crowded ledges during the breeding season from May to August. The marine reserve below the cliffs is one of the clearest and most biologically diverse temperate waters in the British Isles, the combination of the rocky reef habitat and the relatively unpolluted North Sea water creating conditions that attract divers from across Britain. The kelp forests, anemone communities and fish populations of the reserve have been the subject of sustained scientific monitoring and provide a baseline understanding of temperate marine ecology. The coastal walking on the cliffs south from St Abbs village toward Fast Castle, a dramatically positioned ruin on a stack below the cliff top, provides excellent cliff scenery in a landscape quite different from the more gentle shores elsewhere on the east coast.

The Bass Rock is a volcanic island of dramatic appearance rising from the Firth of Forth near North Berwick in East Lothian, a 107-metre plug of basalt whose sheer white-encrusted cliffs are home to one of the largest single-rock gannet colonies in the world. The island supports a breeding colony of approximately 150,000 northern gannets, so many that the species was formally named Morus bassanus in recognition of the rock's primacy as a gannet site. The colony is visible and audible from the shore at North Berwick, but boat trips from the harbour provide a close encounter with the birds and the island of quite extraordinary intensity. The gannet colony occupies almost every available surface of the island during the breeding season from February to October, the birds packed so densely onto every ledge, slope and flat surface that the white guano-encrusted rock is effectively invisible beneath the mass of white plumage. The noise, the smell and the ceaseless activity of the colony on a calm summer day create a wildlife spectacle of genuine primordial power, quite unlike any other seabird experience available in Britain. The gannets' aerial fishing dives, plunging from heights of up to thirty metres into the Firth with folded wings, provide constant dramatic display in the waters surrounding the rock. The island also has a considerable historical and political significance. A castle was built on the rock in the fourteenth century, exploiting its natural defensibility, and the Bass Rock gained particular notoriety in the late seventeenth century as a state prison for Covenanters and Jacobites. In 1691 a small party of Jacobite prisoners managed to seize control of the castle from their captors and hold it for three years in defiance of the Williamite government, one of the more remarkable episodes of resistance in Scottish history. The Scottish Seabird Centre at North Berwick provides excellent background to the Bass Rock and the wildlife of the Firth of Forth, with live camera feeds from the colony and boat trips departing from the harbour.