Ring ouzel and source of the River Kent

Sheep on Mardale Ill Bell

Rising steeply above the deep corrie tarn of Blea Water are scree slopes and rock ledges where purple saxifrage is said to grow. It’s a zone of montane flora where sheep cannot graze. I love these solitudes, these mountain redoubts. Paths on High Street and Mardale Ill Bell  follow the ridges, giving vistas but that’s all. Life begins at the spring-head, where the first trickle of water sustains mosses and flowers at the headwaters of the River Kent. These are the wondrous places, biodiversity begins here.  In such a habitat I always hope I might find ring ouzel, the mountain bird. 

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Ring ouzel was on my wish list when my friends  Barbara and Austin came to stay.  It was four years to the day since we had found a pair below Blencathra.  Ring ouzel was singing on my computer when my friends got up next morning, a download from Tweet of the Day. Bill Oddie told us  the ring ouzel call rings out over the mountains but he broadcasts rather well himself and almost drowned-out the bird.  We set out for Hawes Water hoping the song would linger in our memory.
I heard the call as we climbed above Blea Water and Austin located the first bird. He has the knack of finding fast, judging the sound well. There were several birds, calling, moving through the short grass amongst outcropping rock- a family of ring ouzel.  A black bird with a white torque about its throat and breast, Turdus torquatus, the mountain blackbird. Its rarity and its love of solitary places confers an aura on the bird. The midges were biting but who cares. So we sat beside the rocky track and watched ring ouzels.

Two corrie tarns. Small Water with Blea Water glimpsed left of centre

There are tiny tarns with cotton grass near the summit of  Mardale Ill Bell and we lingered to take photographs. Off the track, the ground grew boggy and we followed a water-track at the source of the River Kent to find mosses and starry saxifrage. It’s a delicate flower and once again I observed the different patterns within the flower as it begins to fruit. Ecologist Jacqui Ogden confirmed for me that  I’m seeing where pollination has occurred. The flower-stems rise out of rosy rosettes of leaves- it’s a beautiful plant in the perfect place.

Tarn on Mardale Ill Bell with seed-heads of cotton grass. Looking toward Kentdale

Top row: from the left. Cotton grass on the Mardale Ill Bell watershed. Starry saxifrage, pollinated flower to the right,  with basal rosettes bottom left. Moss, and pink lousewort.

A pilgrimage to the source of a river has mystery, a sense of the sacred. This theme runs through my new book and it evolved as I wrote. And it underpins the structure. It’s a riff on spring-head and watershed, the source of three rivers: the Kent, the Duddon and the Eden.  When we found the starry saxifrage on the watershed it reminded me of the first time I’d left the ridge to seek-out the spring-head some years before.  Leaving the stony, well-worn track to find lush mosses and flowers where water seeped and trickled down the mountain-side.  And the time, years ago, when my parents and I went looking for the source of the River Thames. 
On the descent from the Nan Bield Pass to Small Water we found more water-tracks and starry saxifrage and butterwort. And the most beautiful moss, voluptuous with little green stars.  
A walk in a well-loved place evokes other times, other seasons. I remembered water lobelia flowering in Small Water but we found little trace of the plant.