I’m walking through Ravenscraig, once the site of the largest steelworks in Europe, which was closed and demolished more than 30 years ago. While there has been some redevelopment on its fringes, the bulk of the site has been left. The skylarks that soar upwards to become nothing but song will look down on the circles where once were cooling towers and gas towers, the rectangular templates of the buildings, strip mills and coke ovens, and roads leading to them, edges now softened and fringed with birch and willow.
From a distance, the oxeye daisies intermingling with the lush grasses look like a smattering of snow; close up, thick swards of grass are peppered with St John’s wort, yellow rattle, tufted and yellow vetch, and red clover – little pings of colour amid the subtle pinks, purples and greens of the grasses.
Mosses cover cracked concrete foundations and steps that are trodden no longer, enlivened instead by beautiful, almost luminescent clumps of biting stonecrop. Everything is muted by birches and mosses and grasses, the pioneer and ruderal species. Bees busy themselves around the violet-blue viper’s bugloss and masses of kidney vetch and bird’s-foot trefoil (which, if you look closely at the shape of its flowers, reveals why in the Scots language it’s known as craw’s taes). Common spotted orchids and marsh orchids in varying pinks and purples grow too.
Tucked underneath a slightly more mature bank of birches, and peeking out from thick leaf litter are pale, almost fleshy looking stalks and flowers that are completely without colour: a wonderful colony of yellow bird’s nests. Scarce in Scotland, I’m delighted to find them. Lacking chlorophyll, these orchids take their nutrients from mycorrhizal fungi rather than from photosynthesis. Close by, I found a single common wintergreen and common twayblade, also an orchid, but named for its two leaves.
Ravenscraig is a complicated, remarkable place that never ceases to surprise me with the nature it holds. It’s a real lesson about what can be under our noses, what we can find in what seems like the most unremarkable spaces, and what happens when nature is left to its own devices.
• Country diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 (Guardian Faber) is published on 26 September; pre-order now at the guardianbookshop.com and get a 20% discount
