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 Salt-marsh with mud creeks, and Piel Castle Spotlight and floodlight play over Piel Castle and cloud-shadows flow over the salt-marsh threaded with creeks where curlew and redshank call. Shingle, mud-flats and deep-water channels are sunlit, colour and fade. . To the north, Piel Castle, Barrow, Black Combe and White Combe, the outliers of the fells. To the south, Morecambe Bay and Blackpool Tower. To the west, sand-dunes and the Irish Sea and wind farms.
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 Small-leaved lime, Tilia cordata in Roudsea wood Sunlight filters through a canopy of ancient woodland on a September day at Roudsea wood. Insects are lively in the warm sun. Speckled wood butterflies on the wing in glades between woodland fringe and rides, settling in leaf litter, on leaf and flower. Common darter and black darters bask in the warmth and mate.
Rousdea wood has charcoal pit-steads, tan bark barn, bark peelers house, potash kiln and powder house, The industrial archaeology of ancient woodland.  Guelder Rose, Viburnum Opulus I have longed for Smardale, longed so deep that the reality may not live up to the longing. This year, this long year, spring and summer pass by with Smardale unvisited, autumn is come and here we are, at last.
For my companion I choose a looker, someone who delves dimensions and misses nothing. Someone curious. Who has to include Waitby Greenriggs in the fading light to see how every loop of railway line connects, from live lines with trains to disused railway tracks with embankments now habitat for flora and butterflies.  Tales from the Stave: starling I heard a chorus of birds and followed to find a flock of starling strung along triple wires between telegraph poles. Dark shapes like notes of music on a stave. A stave of starling, that's my collective noun for them. Plumage of subtle colour, sheen and pattern. Birds preening. fluttering above and below the wires, then all off in a whoosh.
A soloist sang close by in the reed beds, clear and insistent. Forget the starling chorus, I'm the one.  Sunlit grasshopper Cumbria Wildlife Trust reminds us that the stridulations of grasshoppers are the sound of summer. This one was silent as it settled in bright sunshine on a chunk of limestone.
I've noticed that there are days when few butterflies are on the wing but still the grasshopper chorus is loud in the grass. It's unusual to see one so well and the rock makes a perfect foil. Beautiful weather for the Bank Holiday and the last days of August. So my theme is sunlight and shadow. Shadow-play over the fells to the west. The Langdale Pikes are always a focal point and all morning they are sunlit and shadowed, by turns. |
AuthorJan Wiltshire is a nature writer living in Cumbria. She also explores islands and coast and the wildlife experience. (See Home and My Books.) Archives
January 2021
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