The ITER first wall is designed for start-up and ramp-down in limiter configuration. The wall panels are toroidally shaped in order to spread the incident parallel power flux q|| uniformly, assuming a single decay length λq whose value is not known from first principles. In order to study the scaling of q|| with plasma parameters, infra-red viewing of specially-designed limiters has been used on the COMPASS tokamak in ∼100 discharges with scans in Ip, ne and for all combinations of magnetic field and Ip directions. The IR measurement clearly shows that in addition to the main SOL heat flux profile with λq>40mm, a steep gradient (λqnear=4±2mm) dominates q|| near separatrix. This appears independently of limiter shaping, insertion with respect to neighbors and incident field-line angles. Good agreement is found between the measured λqnear and the prediction of a heuristic drift-based model.