Heading home from our Edinburgh family in late July we took the A68 south and gave a little cheer as we breasted Carter Bar and passed into England again – it’s nothing anti-Scottish, we give a little cheer when we are heading north and pass into Scotland too. Seconds later I noticed a young Golden Eagle close to us. It was a brief encounter as we were heading downhill, quite fast, on a straight bit of road, and it was heading updraft on a breeze, but it was still a memorable sighting and one which may well become more and more commonplace in future (click here). A bit further down the road by Catcleugh Reservoir we kept our eyes open for the Osprey that Rosemary had spotted (my eyes were on the road) the last time we drove south this way but with no luck.
Sometimes we travel on the A1 (with the advantage of potential stop-offs for birds on the coast from Lindisfarne to Seahouses (and fish and chips at Seahouses) and a view of the Angel of the North but the disadvantage of traffic around Newcastle and no hills) and sometimes we take a western route but our favoured route is the A68 with varied scenery a good chip-shop at Jedburgh, a couple of spectacularly cheap petrol stations in deepest County Durham and a new cafe, The 68, which does good simple food although the menu is slow to load on their overly-flash website (click here). If Ospreys and Golden Eagles are increasingly on the menu that will be another reason to travel the A68.
The A68 gives the traveller glimpses of windfarms, forestry plantations, sheep and grouse moors as well as a few tourist destinations such as Hadrian’s Wall. You pass through bits of the Northumberland National Park and along the border of the North Pennines AONB. The road almost feels like a tour through most of the UK’s upland issues and complexities. It’s a good road to stimulate your thoughts about upland land use and what might be. Let there be eagles, and Lynx please!
I’ll come back to that soon.
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Driving over the Carter Bar into Scotland is the best way to arrive in Scotland, but then I’m a Borderer. Up at the other end of the A68, I have friends who are sheep farmers and bird-lovers and I won’t forget their mixed emotions on spotting a golden eagle flying over their land (one on the move from the Peebles area they thought).
There was one female eagle left nesting unsuccessfully in Keilder Forest, oh, can I remember… Maybe around 2010. I was Area Officer for Scottish Natural Heritage at the time. So sad that the eagles died out in Scottish Borders until the recent Eagle reintroduction got going. Wonderful.