A Newt Frontier

There be wee dragons.

ID 118687933 | Great Crested Newt © Martin Pelanek | Dreamstime.com

Great Crested Newt (without crest but with evident sass)

If you’re the size of a Great Crested Newt, then a Newt Fence, like the one I encountered on Boxing Day whilst visiting my folks, is about as tall as a ten-story building. Propped up by wooden stakes and manufactured from stiff polythene sheeting, a Newt Fence has a skirt that extends underground to prevent burrowing, and a slippery top lip to prevent climbing. It’s designed to enclose and protect this endangered amphibian species. And the one that surrounds the former landfill site halfway between my childhood home at the top of the brae and the Stirlingshire village of Banknock at its foot, is an epic arterial construction at a newts’ eye level.

The Newt Frontier of Banknock

With its dark, almost black, warty back, mottled flanks and zingy orange spotted underbelly, the Great Crested Newt is twice the size of the UK’s two other native newt species. Females are larger than males and can reach up to 6.7 inches (15cms). But it’s the males which display the jagged neck to tail crest which gives these creatures their name, and only then in the spring breeding season, when they acquire a flashy tail for courtship dancing as well. It gives them the fierce look of wee dragons or dinosaurs.

Image: ID 41278880 | Great Crested Newt © Dirk Ercken | Dreamstime.com

There were, unsurprisingly, no tiny water dragons to be seen this week by the site of the old Cannerton brickworks. Newts lie low over the winter months. There was however ample evidence of other wildness in the willow, birch and dogwood scrub, the drainage pipes and oil drums, the echoey undersides of the old railway bridge.

‘Pissed as a newt’, as they say.

Buckfast. Smirnoff. Lucozade.

Redbull. Strongbow. Monster.

And not forgetting the newt’s favourite, surely?

Dragon Soop

The Great Crested Newt’s Latinate name - Triturus cristatus - is a nod to Greek mythology, to Triton, merman son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, rulers of the sea. Newts wouldn’t thank you for salt spray though. They’re freshwater creatures, and the extensive loss of ponds, woods and grassland due to urbanisation and industrial agriculture, is what’s decimated their numbers in the UK over the past 100 years.

The old Cannerton Brickworks site brought to you by the colour BLUE

Nowadays, ponds adjoining brownfield sites offer potentially good habitat for Great Crested Newts. And housing developers hold their breaths when a Newt Survey is instigated, because the Great Crested Newt is a protected species, making it illegal to harm, disturb, or destroy them or their habitats. The Great Newt Fence of Banknock is a mitigation constructed for a proposed (and repeatedly stalled) housing development on the edge of the M80 motorway that would increase the local village population by a quarter.

Vent for build up of dragon’s breath

It’s a tricky post-industrial site though, and not just because of newts. It’s topographically uneven. There are old mine workings. And landfill gas vents pockmark the area as a safeguard against the build-up of methane from the former municipal dump. I remember as a kid how much the whole place reeked of rot, and how we were warned not to cross it lest the sludge of late twentieth century consumerism gobble us up like quicksand.

In 2018, I became involved in Spell Songs, a musical response to The Lost Words, an exquisite picture book collaboration between writer, Robert Macfarlane and artist, Jackie Morris (1). Its lush handsome pages are an evocation in acrostic spell and paint of twenty birds, plants and animals whose names had been removed from a recent edition of a popular children’s dictionary to make way for the new language of digital technology.

Our house had been gifted a copy of The Lost Words already. At the time my own children were 11 and 8 years old, and I sat with them one afternoon, flicking through its pages, to check which of those nature names were familiar to them. Acorn. Bluebell. Conker. Daisy. Heather. Otter. My favourite birds were in there too - the Heron and the Wren.

Heron by Jackie Morris

In our wee corner of south-east Scotland, it’s possible to point to every single one of these. Not so easy for others, I know.

The only entry in The Lost Words which stumped my kids at the time was Newt, which made me a wee bit sad. Scotland, despite its tourism rep for ‘wildness’, is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world (2). So I’m glad, at least, that my kids had met the other plants, birds and animals in its pages, and had words for them too.

The Newt Fence of Banknock is looking wabbit these days (3). There are gaps where a gallus endangered amphibian could readily cut loose, and may well have done so already (4). Perhaps, for now, until and unless there’s the fresh threat of diggers, that’s exactly as it should be.

Robert Macfarlane’s Newt spell from The Lost Words

NOTES:

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(1) The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris (Hamish Hamilton, 2017). And here’s more information on Spell Songs.

By the by, the Spell Songs crew did have a go at a musical setting of ‘Newt’ on (I kid you not) the very grand piano (at Rockfield Studio in Wales) on which Freddy Mercury recorded Bohemian Rhapsody with Queen. It descended into parody: I spy a little silhou-ett-e of a NEWT! Little NEWT, little NEWT - will you do the fandango? Am-phib-ious darling, be-loved of Macfarlane etc. Not quite a keeper …

(2) State-of-Nature Report

(3) wabbit - weary, poorly, weak (Scots)

(4) gallus - bold and mischievous (Scots)

Images mine unless otherwise credited.

My writing is supported by the Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship 2025 - Attached to Land - via the Fruitmarket Gallery and Creative Scotland