Through fields clamorous with lambs.  Trees in winter skeletons respond to longer daylight hours with flowers and swelling leaf buds.
Larks ascend in song flight about  Oswen Fell,  joyously.  All around us.
Blake Fell in the distance (in clearing cloud) the  highest fell of the day - a lunch spot within a summit-shelter welcome in a chill wind.  Through fleeting cloud we glimpse the higher fells. These grassy  fells are little walked and we meet only a few walkers all day.

Birker Fell,   surrounded by lark song.  Beyond tussocks of golden grasses Harknott Pass,  a fort on the Roman Road between the fort of Ravenglass and Hadrian’s Wall. Ravenglass ( Giannoventa) provisioning the north west.
St Bees Head and its seabird cliffs is today’s objective.  Gorse flowering along the cliff path,  flowers of scurvy grass and birdsong.  Although I cannot hear the yellowhammer I remember from my first visit. Eroded  and weathered sandstone cliffs, deep red through a coating of  iron oxide.

A bough of new  leaves with last summer’s cherries against  a sandstone wall.  A flock of Swaledales trots into Dufton as we head east for the Pennine Way and High Cup Nick. Through limestone country,  an area of shakeholes and limekilns.   Time to consider how geology determines  hydrology and what lichens appear on rock.  Strands Beck, the only beck named on the OS map, surface water pouring down from Hannah's Well  where there’s a shift in geology. 
Anticipation is high. The grand reveal will come slowly as we climb. 

Rain all day Saturday. Three days later and flood plains beside the River Ure were underwater.  An atmospheric day below Abbotside Common, at High Clint and Low Pike.  All around us the call of curlew and of lapwing, the song of skylark.  A glimmer of sunlight through low cloud.
At Hawes, the Wensleydale Creamery was doing a brisk trade in its range of local cheeses.

Through Atlantic fronts, through a week of wind and rain,  I immerse myself in the Shetland experience. A reprise of three weeks spent exploring the Shetland Isles in June and July 2011.  An interval of nine years brings change and that's a telling  perspective- a history of natural history.     
I focus on a selection of locations and  themes, not including  the coming of North Sea Oil to Shetland- its influence on the infrastructure, its impact on wildlife.
Then I heard Shetland naturalist Bobby Tulloch, a recording from 1974 and I was in deep.

The hawk must have killed moments before.  Clinging  to the feeder, balanced by its long tail,  poise and white splotches on a grey-brown mantle said sparrrowhawk.  That long first claw skewered a bloody collop to the top-stone.  Impossible to say what the sparrowhawk had for breakfast. The raptor  had quickly plucked its prey, ripped it open.  No trace of feathers on the patio, but heavy rain might have washed them away. Small birds feel sheltered by trees and shrubs but the sparrowhawk is swift, an agile  hunter is confined spaces.