Qualla: Loch Druidibeg

Loch Druidibeg: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gordon Hatton, CC BY-SA 2.0. In autumn the geese arrive in lines. Greylag geese - Anser anser, the ancestor of every domestic farmyard goose in Europe - have used Loch Druidibeg as a breeding ground for so long that the colony here became the most important in Britain. They land in the shallows and on the islets, raise their goslings on the machair, and in good years the population fledges in the thousands. The corncrake, too, holds out here - a small brown rail whose harsh nocturnal kerrx-kerrx call once echoed across every European hayfield but which has retreated, in Britain, almost entirely to the Outer Hebrides.

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Image: Gordon Hatton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loch Druidibeg: A Cross-Section of Habitats

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nessy-Pic, CC BY-SA 3.0. Loch Druidibeg is unusual because it offers, within a small area, a complete cross-section of Hebridean ecological zones. From the west comes alkaline machair grassland - a thin, calcareous soil fertilised by wind-blown shell sand and grazed for centuries by crofting cattle, prod...

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Image: Nessy-Pic | CC BY-SA 3.0

Loch Druidibeg: The Strange Forest

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dave Fergusson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Before the loch became a National Nature Reserve in 1958, someone planted an experimental woodland on the north shore. It was intended as the policies - the ornamental grounds - of an estate lodge that was never built. Whoever made the planting list seems to have ordered from a c...

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Image: Dave Fergusson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loch Druidibeg: Crofters and Conservation

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin Creek, CC BY-SA 2.0. The management approach at Loch Druidibeg deliberately encourages traditional crofting practice - low-intensity cattle grazing, the cutting of machair hay - as integral to maintaining the biodiversity, not as an obstacle to it. The wildflower meadows of the machair exist precisel...

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Image: Martin Creek | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loch Druidibeg: What Was Lost and What Endures

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julian Paren, CC BY-SA 2.0. Some of the designations have come and gone. Loch Druidibeg was declared a National Nature Reserve in 1958 but de-declared in 2012, partly because the formal NNR designation no longer fit the new community-management model. It was a UNESCO biosphere reserve from 1976 until 2013, ...

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Image: Julian Paren | CC BY-SA 2.0