Cloud sits low on Rampgsill Head and the roaring of stags echoes about Martindale. Mid-October and the season of the red deer rut, an ancient, atavistic sound-scape. The Martindale herd of native red deer is the oldest in England. Through the loud wind the stags bellow their challenge for control of the hinds. From Hartsop, up past Gray Crag, listening and searching the gullies above Hayeswater, below The Knott, toward Rest Dodd and the head of Rampsgill, below Place Fell we hear the bellowing of the stags. It’s a rite of autumn, the deer rut experience.
An atavistic experience, recorded with digital camera and a video with roaring almost drowned out by the wind. At Hartsop, information boards tell of the Hayeswater Hydropower Scheme. Water is abstracted at the intake and ‘ travels ( by gravity) down a buried pipe to the turbine at the powerhouse.’ Beside Hayeswater Gill we contemplate the engineering, the powerhouse and new grating, drainage channels and pipe along the track. There’s orange peel fungus in the gravels- a habitat it favours. Orange peel fungus, Aleuria aurantia. A peregrine calls from the heights. Raven, peregrine and the roaring of red deer.
Hinds are slender, their subtle colours through soft greys to chestnut, perfect camouflage for the fell-side. The stag is built for combat: a thick neck to absorb the impact of the charge, antlers that grow larger, more tines come with age. Today, the stags bellow and roar but don’t engage in combat.
Beyond Angle Tarn, there is marsh forklet- a moss that favours the edges of streams. Odd that I couldn't recall the name but I could visualise the precise location where water-tracks trickle over the path at the foot of a slope. And there it was. Marsh forklet, Dichodontium palustre.
Beyond Angle Tarn, there is marsh forklet- a moss that favours the edges of streams. Odd that I couldn't recall the name but I could visualise the precise location where water-tracks trickle over the path at the foot of a slope. And there it was. Marsh forklet, Dichodontium palustre.
After supper that evening, Barbara, Austin and I review our deer rut day over a tot of Jura single malt. How I’d love to be on Jura when the geese arrive and the red deer rut is on- all 5,000 of them, imagine it! Those highly manicured greens of the exclusive Ardfin Estate golf course would make fine rutting greens. I think upon Loch Tarbert, where in medieval times the deer would be driven north from Ardfin and trapped by hunters with bows and arrows at the narrow isthmus.
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