Barn and Upland Hay Meadow, High Borrowdale The Upland Hay Meadows of High Borrowdale were our objective. They'd be at their best late June, early July, but weather and Climate Change affect timing and I wanted to do a recce.
My companion told me of friends who grew up on farms hereabouts and conservation includes farmsteads, like High Borrowdale, the network of barns and dry stone walls that are the character of this landscape. As a child on family holidays, we'd have driven this way over Shap and I wish I could revisit the landscape as it was at that time.
My companion told me of friends who grew up on farms hereabouts and conservation includes farmsteads, like High Borrowdale, the network of barns and dry stone walls that are the character of this landscape. As a child on family holidays, we'd have driven this way over Shap and I wish I could revisit the landscape as it was at that time.
We're early for the Upland Hay Meadows but there's a floral spectacular the moment you cross the A6 and head down the track that runs south of Borrow Beck. We quickly find ragged robin and butterwort growing right beside the track. There's a mass of the blue and violet flowers of pyramidal bugle, amidst cow parsley and the white flowers of some species of bedstraw ( galium). The white plumes of cotton grass show in the peat low on the fell-side.
Eyebright and yellow rattle are key plants to ensure the biodiversity of a hay meadow. Saprophytes, they send out a mass of underground threads that tap into grass roots to suck up minerals and nutrients and in doing so they weaken the grasses and allow a range of flora to thrive. I love the structure of yellow rattle flowers and the inflated calyx that will develop into the seed-head that gives rattle a range of names, rattle belly is one. There's an iridescent green beetle that favours hawk's bit and they're a motif I love to find. So here are two such beetles mating. Their Latin name is somewhere in my archive, to be retrieved, perhaps.
Cryptocephalus Hypochaeridis on yellow composite - found it, courtesy of the search facility on my blog! Not surprised I couldn't immediately recall the name for the beetle, it's Greek not Latin.
There are white ox-eye daisies and the yellow flowers of hawks-beard, hawk's-bit, hawksweed. And what distinguishes this complex genus from dandelions? There is more to flora than taxonomy and this time I'll go for the beauty and the experience.
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