Lingmoor: ling and lepidoptera

Swallows of Middle Fell Farm

     



 I set out early for Lingmoor, hoping for quiet country roads and a peaceful journey.  I was in for a shock. 

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​Out of the blue, I came upon a herd of Aberdeen Angus cows and calves as I drove into Great Langdale, and the farmer gestured me to the side of the walled and narrow road.  I tried for an escape route up a steepish bank but my tyres spun on grit and as the lead cows reached me I switched off the engine with the car not entirely off the road. To the rear,  several cows and calves  had broken  away from the herd ,  climbed  up onto the bank  above me and  all that weight came bearing  down upon my car which almost blocked an exit I had not foreseen and the farmer never intended, and the herd engulfed me in blackness as the break-aways bulldozed into a gap between me and the wall ,  thudding , thumping and rocking  my car which shuddered, as I did.  How would it withstand this onslaught?   The farmers were out of sight in robust, off-road vehicles and I felt I had been abandoned to the herd.  Then it was over, and with a hasty wave the farmer was gone and I made my way to the Old Dungeon Ghyll  Hotel car park  to find my near-side daubed with cow shit and  black hairs  stuck on the off-side side from my Aberdeen Angus tight squeeze.
A restorative interlude below Raven Crag, by Middle Fell Farm, where I was attracted by the din of swallows at home about the wires of the farmhouse chimneystack. The domestic life of swallows: busily flying to and fro, feeding their begging juveniles, preening and sleeking their feathers.  Long tail streamers distinguished the adult birds, and a wondrous warm light suffused their white breasts and cast their shadows cast on the lime-washed wall. Swallows perched on a wriggle of wires about the chimneystack in intimate relation to farmstead and barn.  What a morning!

​It wasn’t chance that brought me to Lingmoor, but it was good fortune. How rarely season and weather coincide to highlight the heather habitat at its most vivacious!   From 9 July, when a hose-pipe ban was imposed on the North West, there had been unsettled weather with rain and a prevailing gloom.  Yesterday came high pressure and Sunday quickly grew hot on a still and humid day with hazy sunshine.  Perfect for the ling of Lingmoor experience with heather in full bloom and fragrant, and the air astir with insects on the wing and seeking nectar: grasshoppers, hoverflies, bees, pale fluttering moths, tortoiseshell butterflies and clouds of midges.  Beyond the whine of insects and vibrant wings was the distant sound of waterfalls from Dungeon Ghyll and Stickle Ghyll where toward mid-day a hundred tiny figures were strung out along the track and through my binoculars I could just make out Stickle Tarn and above it rose Pavey Ark and Jack’s Rake which I first climbed on a sultry summer’s day.  Here on Lingmoor was solitude and, with a hazy backdrop of the Langdale Pikes, the rich colours were at my feet.  The undulating ridge had rocky outcrops with flowers of heather and bell heather, burnt heather, red- stemmed crowberry, bilberry, stag’s-horn clubmoss and all textured with tall seeding grasses with fine red stems.  Descending from the ridge down to Lingmoor Tarn were the tiniest tarns with cotton- grass tinged wine-red and sphagnum moss with insect-eating sundew having a feast day.  On wet ground, in green dips and hollows, sprays of deergrass flowered with hints of gold, deep pink flowers of cross-leaved heath, and bog asphodel seed heads aflame. How peaceful here on Lingmoor on a lazy, hazy late-summer’s day in fragrant heather habitat alive with insects.  Whirring like a yellow and black gold-ringed dragonfly, a helicopter skimmed low over Wrynose and headed for Pike o’Blisco and for an illusory moment a buzzard seemed to keep pace with it.  A greenish-yellow creature with dark flecks of colour on its scales scurried across my track and came to rest on a rock.  Zootaca vivipara, the viviparous lizard with a wealth of insect prey at hand.  Viviparous: in a rapid response to the hot sun the female gives birth to live young.  Now that would really be something to see!  I try to imagine the lizard in hibernation during the harsh winter:  underground, deep in a rubble of rock, sheltered by stout stems of heather woven with soft sphagnum moss. 

 A buzzard called and soared on a thermal, higher and higher until it was out of sight. Cloud swept over the heather in evanescent colours.  Flowers bloomed and faded into late summer:  bell heather of magenta and papery brown flowers, pink bells of cross-leaved heath matured to tawny russet.  For insects to catch the perfect conditions of hot sun to pollinate flowers and breed this time-dispersed flowering is vital.  Lingmoor was wondrous in the detail and in the overview.  Colour and motif flowed over a topography of rocky knoll and damp hollows in a fluid design of infinite subtlety.
​Fresh from a rereading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’, and the adventures of David Balfour and Alan Breck who ‘take to the heather’ in flight from King George’s Redcoat soldiers, I wandered by Lingmoor Tarn in a take to the heather fantasy, finding a split rock where I might hide in the solitudes of Lingmoor knolls and hollows.  Ranging over heather puts a spring in the step and I imagine  it would be comfortable for a bed, with drinking water trickling down toward the tarn for fugitives who don’t mind sharing it with a few Herdwicks.  A lone figure appeared on up on Side Pike, scanning the landscape, but I doubt he saw me and he was not a Red Coat: I was safe.