Skin-crawling pic of a Scottish midges swarming round tent is straight out of a backwoods horror movie

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You will be itching and scratching by the end of this story

Midge swarm in Utah
(Image credit: Getty Images / The Washington Post)

Visit Scotland (née the Scottish Tourist Board) may have a bone to pick with National Trust For Scotland over an image the latter just poster on its X (née Twitter) feed. Especially considering the caption National Trust For Scotland decided to give it.

“Ah, summer in Scotland!” said the post cheerily, dripping with irony, alongside a  skin crawling image of possibly tens or hundreds of thousands of midges swarming around a tent pitched on the Mar Lodge Estate National Nature Reserve in the heart of the Cairngorms. 

If you zoom in on the image, you’ll get a better idea of just how dense this swarm is. You’d certainly want to keep your mouth closed and nose pinched if you were forced to go out in that, and don’t even think about the bite potential – we’d recommend a hazmat suit (though there are other ways to avoid midge bites).

It truly is like something out of a backwoods horror movie.

Midges are always an issue in Scotland in the summer (and an issue that Visit Scotland doesn’t tend to highlight, naturally). And after a few scorching summers in the UK, this summer has been been a bit of a washout (they call it a “dreich” summer in Scotland – and midges love a damp summer. But this particularly dense swarm reminds us of those infamous Mississippi mayfly invasions.

According to STV News, “Females lay their first eggs in the spring and don’t need to take a bite or any blood to be able to do this, but they do need a blood meal before laying every new batch of eggs after that – and they can lay three more batches before autumn if conditions are right.”

So they’re still biting, even though we’re into the fall now.

Dave Golder