Mountain Pansies

We have recently returned from a very pleasant holiday in the Spey Valley. On our favourite evening stroll, high above the River Spey near Kingussie, we were delighted to discover that you do not need to be in the mountains to see Mountain Pansy.

We were staying in a cottage at Ruthven, just outside the town of Kingussie, overlooking Ruthven Barracks, a ruined fortress built to combat the Highlanders at the end of the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion. 

It stands overlooking the wide valley of the river on an esker, a long narrow ridge of sand and gravel laid down beneath slow moving glaciers, and exposed when the glacier retreats at the end of the ice age. There are numerous eskers on this stretch of the Spey.

One evening we spotted a Curlew at the foot of this esker watching over its chicks as they scampered over the moor. On most of our evening walks we could hear and often see Curlew and Lapwing calling, as they soared from the valley to the surrounding hillsides. Our favourite evening stroll took us along a track which ran under the busy A9 and then curved round into a wonderland of wild flowers on the steep hillside looking down to the Spey far below. The dominant colour at this mid-June time of year was white: we had a profusion of Stitchwort and white umbellifers, possibly mainly Pignut.  But our focus was on several clusters of purple peeping through the tall grass on the steep bank. Through binoculars we could see that they were a form of pansy. The Google Lens identifying app suggested that they were Wild Pansy, but we were almost sure that they were the Mountain Pansy. We could not gain access to inspect closer.

Further along the track we turned onto heathland with much shorter grass and there to our delight were several clusters of low-lying pansy which Google Lens did then identify as the Mountain Pansy. We wish that we had taken more photos of this little gem, but did at least capture a couple of images of the clusters in the longer grass.

Anne and Bill Gray