Nature Journaling in Scotland
Keeping the Memories of a Wild Week Away

Explore nature journaling in Scotland with me – sketches and notes from my week’s holiday in one of my favourite places in the world, beautiful Dumfries and Galloway...

September Scotland trip - Galloway Forest Park

This month, I’m sharing my nature journal pages inspired by my week away in Scotland. It was a lovely relaxing time with my husband, and we visited lots of beautiful places and noticed some really cool things in nature, which, naturally, I recorded in my nature journal as a way of keeping the memories vivid and feeling close to me.

In my normal day-to-day journaling, I often journal to notice and appreciate the natural world around me – a way of relaxing and feeling more grounded and present...

For my holiday, my nature journal felt more like a nature-inspired travel journal, gathering my most treasured wildlife and nature memories into a book for safe-keeping.

As well as sharing some of my cool nature highlights with you and giving you a little taste of Scottish wildlife and nature, I’ll share a few different ways that I journaled my holiday, to give you ideas for different ways of journaling.

A nature journal doesn't have to record everything, and it doesn't have to be completed in the moment. It can simply gather the things you don't want to forget.

Coming Home with More than Photographs

We arrived at our lovely holiday cottage in Dumfries and Galloway excited for the week ahead. Last year’s holiday had been waylaid a little by Storm Amy, so we were hoping for better weather and opportunities to get out and see the countryside around us a bit more – and we weren’t disappointed as we ended up very lucky with the weather, with a cool but mainly sunny week, perfect for walks and days out.

Scotland beach

I always take lots of photos when I go away, but nature journaling can add another dimension to gathering these memories and is a different way of remembering…

I almost feel that, through the physical act of drawing and writing my memories, I get to live them again for a little while. They become more than photographs stored on my phone - I spend time with them again, noticing details and remembering where we were, what happened and how it felt.

It was a busy week, and my husband is not a nature journaler, although he loves nature – so there wasn’t time for journaling in the woods and forests or on the beaches, so my nature journal pages just happened as and when.

I didn't sit down dutifully every evening and make a perfect record of each day. Some pages happened there and then - others the following day, and many actually happened after I’d returned home.

I also drew some pages from life, some from photographs, some were collected objects and some I used reference material to recreate my memories from.

My journal became less a record of everything we did and more a collection of the things I particularly wanted to remember – which makes flicking through it a lovely experience, reminding me of my week away.

Nature Journaling From Life – Watching the Jackdaws

Journaling jackdaws

When we arrived at the cottage, I was excited to find that the church tower opposite was the home of numerous jackdaws.

They were an endless delight to watch, perching on different parts of the tower, interacting, flying off with noisy ‘chacks’ to alight a moment later on a different corner.

I thought it was a great opportunity to draw from life, as it’s something I don’t often get to do in my nature journaling.

I used a monocular (which is like binoculars, but just for one eye) to zoom in on the individual jackdaws I drew so that I could see them more clearly.

Sketching jackdaws from life (through a monocular)

There’s something different and slightly awkward about drawing a bird while it’s actually in front of you. You have to notice quickly, and the bird inevitably flies off before you get to the end of your drawing.

I was quite lucky in that the jackdaws seemed to like to perch in the same spots, so I was able to continue my drawings and came up with something that felt quite finished.

Of course, the church tower luckily did keep still so I drew that as the jackdaw’s habitat – and looking at it reminds me of the view from the holiday cottage window and the sounds of the jackdaws while we were sat there relaxing, just watching out of the window.

Sketching jackdaw tower

I think that's one of the things I like about drawing from life - the finished drawing doesn't have to be perfect to bring you straight back to the experience of making it.

Memorable Encounters – Kingfishers & Red Deer

We were thrilled that on our first evening of our holiday, while crossing the bridge over the River Fleet, we caught a glimpse of a bird swooping low – at first, I thought it was a swallow looping down low to the water, but as it turned it caught the light and flashed first orange and then blue – a kingfisher!

I recorded this quickly in my nature journal the next day, as I didn’t want to forget – so I just sketched quickly from memory, with rough shapes and colours that felt like they reflected what I actually saw (the kingfisher was tiny, I didn’t get a great view!).

Recording a kingfisher sighting in my nature journal from memory

This was really nature journaling from memory - rough shapes and colours that reflected what I'd actually seen rather than a detailed drawing of the bird.

We saw the kingfisher again, in a nearby bit of river, a couple of days later – a movement caught our eye and a flash of blue sped past…

This time, I used a reference photo to draw the kingfisher in close-up detail – not because I saw it like that, but because this is what I would’ve seen had I been able to take a closer look and study it carefully, as I would’ve longed to do. Another way of remembering and owning the experience – even after the moment, kind of the bonus features you get after the event.

Detailed kingfisher drawing

I like having both versions in my journal - one captures the reality of that tiny flash of colour across the river, while the other lets me linger over the bird I only had seconds to see.

One of my other most memorable wildlife encounters was meeting the red deer at the Galloway Forest Park Red Deer Range. This is something that I hoped we’d be able to do on our holiday. We’d visited before, many years ago, but I remembered we didn’t see the deer that close – they were away up on the hill on that occasion…

This time, someone had brought carrots to feed the deer, so they were right there at the gate and by the windows of the wildlife hide – curious and perhaps hungry (or greedy), looking for carrots.

Journaling my experience at the red deer range

I loved to see them so close, the magnificent presence of the stag with his amazing antlers and the curious confidence of the does. We were also lucky enough to glimpse a fawn a little way away, sat peacefully at the edge of the long grass.

They were bigger than the deer we have at home – I was surprised by how fluffy they looked, how red their coats looked and the size of those antlers – so impressive.

Drawing the red deer stag

Their noses were big and black, pushed up against the fence, rather like massive dog’s noses and I was surprised that the pupil in the doe’s eye seemed to sit horizontally, which I’d only noticed on a goat before – apparently this gives them great side vision so they can escape predators, so I guess this is why they often seem to notice us before we notice them out in the wild.

Drawing the doe

It was quite busy, so we took lots of photos and I picked a couple of my favourite photos to draw from once we’d got home. My drawings don’t replace the photos I took – but they do allow a way for me to feel more physically involved in the photo – by drawing and writing my notes – a way of making the photo more mine, more personal, to help my memories feel more vivid.

Watching at the Wildlife Hide

One of the activities I always like to do when in this part of Scotland is to visit the wildlife hides in the Galloway Forest Park at the Kirroughtree Visitor Centre. I’ve often been lucky with seeing a red squirrel there…

And although the last couple of times we missed seeing a red squirrel, we got lucky this time – actually spotting a red squirrel up in the trees before we even reached the hide.

Once we sat in the hide to wait and watch, it seemed quite quiet and empty – last year there were no squirrels but dozens of chaffinches. This time, the feeders were quiet…

This was a very different kind of noticing from our kingfisher encounter. Instead of something appearing in a sudden flash, we had to sit quietly and wait to see what might turn up.

And our patience was rewarded by the arrival of two lovely big jays visiting the feeders together…

Jays & Red Squirrels at the wildlife hide

And as we took another look at the end of our visit, in a further hide, we watched another red squirrel running along some logs or fallen trees – freezing momentarily to listen as he heard our gasps, giving us a great view… but sadly not long enough to get our phones out and take photos…

So this page was done the day after our encounters in the wildlife hides, but using reference photos that replicated what we saw. Although I know that I used reference photos to recreate my memories, now, when I look at the page, it feels like I’m looking at my memory and it reminds me of our day and experiences, which is the whole idea.

Small Discoveries

Going on holiday in a beautiful natural area, isn’t just about the beautiful views and the exciting encounters with rare or unusual wildlife, it’s also about the small moments and small noticings…

Finding little interesting things in nature as we go about our day – this is nice to do in our everyday life, but quite exciting on holiday or in a different location where we can find things that are new to us and therefore easier to notice…

I visited Cally Biodiversity Garden on a sunny afternoon – a wild garden in the woods – and it was filled with butterflies and bees…

Nature journaling a biodiversity garden

A beautiful old fruit tree was covered in different lichens – and I spotted an unusual pink and orange insect on a thistlehead, which I discovered was a Sloe Bug (Hairy Shieldbug) in its final nymph stage – its like this in its raw pink and orange stage for just a few hours just before it transforms to its full adult stage, so I felt really lucky to have spotted it.

On our forest walks, amongst trees dripping with mosses and lichens, we spotted several different types of fungi sprouting up between the mosses and ferns of the forest floor. I photographed these as we walked, to nature journal later, and didn’t try to identify most of the fungi, aside from some amazing yellow finger-like fungi reaching up from the ground…

Forest fungi, mosses & lichens

These were Golden Spindles, also known as Yellow Spindle Coral or Fairy Fingers. I can definitely see them as supernatural fingers grasping out of the earth.

On our forest walks, we took our Merlin Bird ID app, too, as we love listening to the birds as we go out in nature – the forest seemed quiet at first, but then a nuthatch called repeatedly and as we got further in we heard goldcrests, firecrests, siskins, redpoll and a crossbill who kept us company by singing as we reached the deepest part of the forest.

Journaling birdsong in the forest

Although it was exciting to hear these birds, I wasn’t lucky enough to see any of them, so I remembered my experience by drawing a page of different birds from reference photos, so that now I have a colourful and interesting page to prompt my memory of that walk.

I didn't actually see these birds, so my journal page isn't a record of what they looked like on that walk. Instead, it's a reminder of what it felt like to walk through an apparently quiet forest and gradually realise how many birds we could hear around us.

I also snapped photos of this unusual tree I noticed everywhere while we were walking around woodlands…

Hollyberry cotoneaster tree

And when I looked it up later, it turned out to be a plant called Holly Berry Cotoneaster – a non-native that has escaped into the wild through birds eating the berries.

Souvenirs of Scotland

One of my favourite parts of visiting South-West Scotland is the beaches – and we found time to spend a while sat on a beautiful beach listening to the sea.

I found a few interesting shells and brought them home to draw in my journal, alongside a sketch of lichens on the rocks, which I photographed.

Journaling my beach finds

I also picked up these two small red leaves on the last day of our holiday – the first really red leaves I’d seen, as evidence of the beginning of autumn – and pressed them in my nature journal to preserve them...

Collecting the first red leaves of the season

When we got home, they were nicely dried out, the colour darkened from the original brightness – and I was able to add them to my nature journal as another reminder of our holiday.

I love that a nature journal can hold these different kinds of souvenirs together - something found, something drawn, something photographed and something simply remembered.

Finishing my Scotland Nature Journal at Home

You may have noticed that I didn’t create all these pages while I was away on holiday – a good number of them I actually completed once I got home.

This is a point I want to make that nature journaling doesn’t always have to be out in the field…

Nature journaling from photos and collected finds is something I really enjoy doing at home later, and reference photos can also help me recreate memories of experiences where taking my own photo wasn't possible.

In fact, I loved taking my nature journal out once I’d got home, to help extend the holiday a little longer, reliving it and reviving it in my sketches, words, and pages.

The journal isn't evidence that I sat in front of every bird, deer, squirrel and mushroom and drew it perfectly from life. It's my way of holding onto what I noticed.

And perhaps finishing some of the pages afterwards actually helped with that. Sitting at home drawing a red deer or red squirrel gave me another little pocket of time in which to think about the encounter and enjoy it again.

What My Journal Helped Me Keep

We often come home with souvenirs of our holiday – little trinkets, nature finds, photos, - and the pages of my nature journal play a similar role in holding a bit of my holiday inside allowing me to revisit my memories both in the moment of creating the pages, and any time I choose to flick through and remember…

The jackdaws we watched from the cottage and the sudden flash of a kingfisher...

Sitting quietly waiting for squirrels, and seeing red deer close enough to really look at them – noticing their furry coats, their faces and those magnificent antlers...

Fungi on the forest floor, birds heard but never seen, shells brought home from the beach and those first red leaves suggesting that autumn was arriving.

Certainly, my nature journal can’t hold everything I saw in Scotland – but just the things that made me stop for a closer look. Perhaps that's what my nature journal does best - it doesn't help me remember everything but it does help me to remember what I noticed.

If you'd like to explore starting your own nature journaling habit, you can start here in my beginner nature journaling section - or browse my nature journal hub.

You can also explore more easy nature journaling ideas for everyday life here including nature journaling from home.

Have you ever thought about nature journaling..?

If you like nature, you might like to start your own nature journal!

Find out all about nature journaling here...

You can get started with my free guide here.

Or explore my gentle self-paced nature journaling course with nature journaling exercises to get you confident with nature journaling - take a look here...

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Lotti Brown is a self-taught nature artist and nature journaling educator whose hand-drawn work is inspired by wildlife, folklore, and close observation. With 18 years in creative fields and 10 years creating nature art, she brings deep practical experience to her work. Trained by the Wild Wonder Foundation, she shares nature journaling courses and guides online. Her artwork has been licensed internationally and exhibited at Goole Museum and Bridlington Spa in the East Riding of Yorkshire, UK.