St Abbs Head Marine Reserve

Eyemouth · Scottish Borders · United Kingdom

St Abbs Head is a rugged volcanic headland on the Scottish Borders coast, where ancient ignimbrite cliffs plunge into the North Sea above a seabed of gullies, boulder fields, and kelp forests. Since 1984 the waters around the headland have been protected as one of the UK's first voluntary marine reserves, and four decades of reduced fishing pressure have produced a marine ecosystem of remarkable abundance. Wolf fish peer from their dens, lobsters the size of small dogs lurk beneath every overhang, and the rock surfaces are so densely colonised by anemones, sponges, and soft corals that bare stone is almost impossible to find. I walked into the water from St Abbs harbour on a September morning, the fishing boats rocking gently at their moorings behind me. The entry is straightforward: a slipway into sheltered water, then a short surface swim to the rocky reef. I descended alongside a kelp-covered boulder the size of a car, and the underwater landscape opened up around me. Gullies ran perpendicular to the shore, their walls carpeted in dahlia anemones ranging from deep crimson to pale pink and cream. Dead man's fingers coral grew in dense clusters on the overhanging rock, their white polyps extended and feeding in the gentle current. I followed the largest gully seaward, checking the known wolf fish dens. At 15 metres, in a crack beneath a large boulder, I found what I was looking for: the blunt, heavy-jawed face of a wolf fish staring back at me from the darkness. This individual has been resident in this same den for at least three years according to the local dive shop. It watched me with apparent indifference, its mottled grey-brown body wedged tightly into the crack. Wolf fish are the gargoyles of the North Sea: ugly, fascinating, and oddly charismatic.