Grey Mare’s Tail waterfall, Dumfriesshire: 'Mesmerising even to the peregrine falcons that nest in the crags around'

The Grey Mare's Tail waterfall near Moffat, Dumfries and Galloway.

(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

published 10 January 2021

The extraordinary Grey Mare’s Tail waterfall tumbles 200ft from Loch Skeen into the Moffat Water, perhaps mesmerising even the peregrine falcons that nest in the crags around it and little ring ouzels showing off their white necklaces.

The loch, surrounded by soaring Lochcraig Head, Mid Craig and 2,694ft-tall White Coomb, where montane willows grow, is home to Britain’s rarest freshwater fish, the vendace.

The Tail Burn, the river coming from the remote Loch Scene which cascades into the Grey Mares Tail waterfall further downstream from this location.

There are wonderful yet strenuous walks to be had in the Grey Mare's Tail Nature Reserve, following feral goats up and down hills, past 4,000-year-old burial cairns and the Iron Age Tail Burn fort, across boggy moorland and through a deep hanging valley.

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Grey Mare's Tail Nature Reserve, Moffat Hills, Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland. July 2018.

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

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