Silver Washed Fritillary, in the picture

Silver Washed Fritillary, at first glimpse

From the first, the morning was hot with scarcely a breath of air. The wood was calm  and still.  Only the call of a great-spotted woodpecker, the mew of a buzzard, the whine of hoverflies. Grasshoppers were silent, until the sun rose higher and  sunlight flowed into shady glades. Then the grasshopper  chorus began  Tall grasses and flowers were drenched in refreshing dew that brushed  our bare ankles and made  cobwebs visible   Here was a  morning of sensuousness. 

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Micro-moths flitted through  grasses.  The low sun highlighted thick stems of ivy snaking up the trunks of trees.  Honeysuckle wound around and around branches.  The light blazed and  bleached colour from vegetation.  Sunlit flowers rose translucent  against deep pools of shadow created by the trees.
We walked a transitional zone - the spring-line at the foot of the limestone escarpment where the peat mosses begin, where the ground is soft and damp despite the heat-wave.  The stony bed of the beck is dry but I know where to find water.   We have breakfast seated on the stone parapet of a bridge over the catchwater, created at the time of Enclosure to drain the Lyth Valley, to divert water from the fells and channel it out to Morecambe Bay.  The catchwater is overhung with meadowsweet and Greater Willow herb known as codlins and cream..  Still as a statue, a heron sits on a post seeking  prey. 

By 9.30 am the rising sun begins to dispel the woodland shadows.  And the first  butterflies are abroad,  meadow browns, ringlets and whites.   A glimpse of a large butterfly,  the Silver  Washed Fritillary of my quest patrols the shady woodland fringe. in rapid flight.  A beauty settles sunlit on a flower,   gone in an instant but the  image  will live on in my mind's eye.  
Once again, I am immersed in the  Silver Washed Fritillary experience.  They fly out of the shadows, over bracken and brambles, close to my face but rarely settling.  Now one alights in bracken and here's a chance.  No time to check through binoculars, I take the picture - wide angle to be sure I have it. Then I zoom in.  Until I'm home I shall not know for sure what the image shows.

Last time we came here rather later in the morning, so the light falls  differently through the wood and the sunlit glade where I suggest we linger is  in partial shade.  No matter,  a large bright butterfly flies over our heads and alights  on meadow sweet.  The light dazzles, takes out colour.  My video works better, but even so the light is too strong.   
On our return, we walk uphill in full sun then stop for a drink overlooking the Lyth Valley.  There's a trickle of water in the beck and a water-course through the pasture is muddy.  Rain will be most welcome.  The bramble bush where I'd hoped for one last photo-opportunity is frazzled.   In days of extreme heat it has quickly flowered and set seed.  How precarious the brief life of a butterfly when its nectar source is so soon over and done. 

 I'm not done yet. That blade of grass shows an authentic image but I hope for better.  ' Not obsessive,  you're a perfectionist' says my friend.  We speak of Lady Eleanor Glanville of Lincolnshire and of Tickenham Court, Somerset. An entomologist   for whom the Glanville Fritillary is named.  Amongst fritillaries in Witherslack Woods last Sunday, one of the men told her story.  Estranged from her husband, she dedicated her life  to the study of butterflies at a time when science was considered the preserve of men.   Lady Eleanor Glanville, 1654-1709.   She was born toward the end of the Civil War, then in 1660 came  in the Restoration. Turbulent times. She   was a contemporary of  John Milton.  And of John Evelyn who was commissioned by King Charles II to report on the loss of oak woodland, consequent on the felling of oak to build warships for the English navy.  There was habitat loss and species loss in the 17ty century but  nothing like the catastrophic   scale and pace we experience now in 21st century, and  globally.  I reflect with longing on the abundance Lady Eleanor would have known. 
How did a woman in the 17th century go about the study of butterflies with none of the optics we all have to hand?  How did she delve the life cycle of the fritillary?  I'd love to see the records she made, the correspondence she shared on her observations.  Here's a link to the life of Lady Eleanor and her home at Tichenham Court.

                    https://www.historichousesfoundation.org.uk/tickenham-court​ ​ 

​Lady Eleanor Glanville has several new  admirers.   From the gentleman in Witherslack Woods, I share her with my friends.  I love the way moments in our personal histories ricochet, with  surprise illumination, interweaving  with the lives and passions of others, back and forth through time.  I know Tickenham Court where Lady Eleanor died.  If only we might revisit the data-base of memory, search our experience for something overlooked when our focus might have been elsewhere.  If only we could pinpoint and retrieve what then we saw and bring it clearly into focus.