This summer, we launched our Words of the Wild nature writing competition, encouraging people to send us stories inspired by Scotland’s wildlife and wild places. We had a fantastic response, with over 500 entries submitted. Below, you can read the entry from one of our adult finalists, Anne V McClure. We will be announcing the winners of the competition at our 60th anniversary event at the Scottish Parliament on 13 November.

A Walk in the Wild

by Anne V McClure

‘Cumbernauld is wild,’ I say. ‘Aye,’ folk reply, ‘I’ve heard it’s pretty rough outside the Spur pub at kicking out time.’

Join me for a walk; away from the brutalist 1950s Town Centre, now leaky as a sieve; away from the graffitied underpasses and the endless roundabouts. Come and see that you can get as lost in green spaces as among the house numbers.

First, let’s saunter down Luggiebank. A few years ago you’d have found a tangle of dogwood choking birch and hawthorn, refusing to let light penetrate the understory, allowing nothing to grow on the forest floor. Now shrubs and trees unkink their stymied limbs and stretch towards the light. Bluebells, dormant for years, are spreading out in glimmering rivers. The dreaded dogwood, dismembered, has its uses. Woven into dead hedges, standing in serried ranks, it becomes home to insects that birds feast on, and shelters mammals like hedgehogs and voles. Some hedges are higgledy-piggledy, made by folk keen to attack the next dogwood. Others are engineered to perfection by someone with patience. See that path, smoothed by decades of padding feet? That’s a badger clan’s route; don’t put anything in its way.

At St Maurice’s Pond let’s see if the grey heron is at his usual spot, standing motionless like a Grenadier guard in his greatcoat. Above the boardwalk, damsel and dragonflies flit on glistening blue and silver wings. There’s the gorse whose flowers prove that on the sunny side they taste of coconut and on the shady side of peas. Between the pond and carpark, firework colours of orchids and knapweed, ox-eye daisy and meadow vetchling explode from the meadows. Frogs shelter in the shade of those plants and grasshoppers hum. We scythed those meadows on hot August days as if in a local version of Poldark. Except we kept our shirts on. It is Cumbernauld, not Cornwall, after all. Hear the mew of a buzzard and look up to see an adult catch a thermal, watched by a juvenile learning how to use this aerial elevator.

The Community Park is Cumbernauld’s best food take-away. You’ll find hazelnuts to ripen at home, sloes for gin and brambles for jam, rosebay willowherb to make black tea, hawthorns for ketchup and cleavers to give a crisp, cucumber taste to water. If you feel you’re being watched, you probably are, as deer are plentiful. Hear the satisfying crunch as volunteers snap Himalayan Balsam they’ve uprooted, clearing waterways of a plant that doesn’t belong and would take over. Come back at dusk, stand on the path between the hedgerows, and have your hair parted by soprano pipistrelle bats chasing insects in a Top Gun precision fly past.

Another day we can visit Broadwood Loch, Abronhill peat bog, Seafar Woods and all the other places. Meantime, as you walk from your house to the shops, enjoy the wildflowers planted in Carbrain Gully. If you’re in the Village, visit the Middle Age Langriggs, one of the last remaining in Scotland, now restored to a place where local folk grow food and wildlife is abundant.

But we do have time to visit the Glen, and I’ve saved the best till now. When the earth last warmed, some 15,000 years ago, the ice that covered Scotland a kilometre deep retreated north, leaving a great lake of meltwater just outside Cumbernauld. Finally the force of the water broke through, gouging great channels through the rocks, carving the Vault Glen. Over time the Glen and its slopes were covered by generations of trees and plants that grew then fell, decayed and created the soil for a myriad of insects, birds and animals to live in and on. It’s said, the meeting of two streams here, the Red Burn and the Bog Stank, gave Cumar nan Allt its name.

No one knows the age of the yew trees in the Glen. Unlikely, but perhaps they date to when Romans built the Antonine Wall a few miles away. Maybe a Syrian archer, on his way to a frozen north and an unknown future, marching through England, saw a twisted old yew that reminded him of the olive trees in his native land, took a cutting and brought it here.

Then this yew watched the Romans retreat, the medieval building of the Village church and the raising of the Comyn’s motte and bailey castle. Perhaps John ‘Red’ Comyn leaned against it as he debated whether to accept Robert the Bruce’s invitation to meet in Dumfries. A decision to go which cost Comyn his life, gave Bruce the kingship of Scotland and changed our history forever. Those days pine marten, red squirrel and wolves shared the woods with humans. I’ve heard rumours that pine martens have been seen here again.

That tree knows if hooded Druidic figures really do cavort around the Dovecot at night. It’s withstood the building of the railway and even the filming of Gregory’s Girl.

Now, in daytime, the Glen echoes to the sound of children laughing and dogs barking. To the clatter of crews filming Outlander. To the people of Cumbernauld who discovered a sanctuary here during lockdown and who love the place. Some who come out at 5am to listen to the bird chorus, spotting tree creepers and nuthatches and thrilling to the joyful blue flash of a jay. Folk who widen paths and hold each other up when they’re sad, who mend fences and tell ridiculous jokes. In the hush of a snowy, winter night a fox crosses the stream by a fallen log bridge, leaving unexpected footprints for us to find four feet off the ground. Hoar frost crackles out of decaying wood creating fantastical shapes. Our walk is done.

The Tax Office is gone. The Town Centre will come down. Few buildings last. The rocks and the trees and the land endure, although changed and always changing.

All within 3 miles of your door.

Is Cumbernauld wild? Yes, yes, yes.

Read the entries from our other two adult finalists:

• In the Stillness by Hannah Murphy
• Òran an Fhèidh by Marcas Mac an Tuairneir