Silage-making seen from Scout Scar escarpment Scout Scar escarpment is the perfect vantage-point looking down on farmers busy making silage in the Lyth Valley. A few days of sun and a warm wind enable farmers to cut grass at its optimum to make fodder for dairy cattle during winter. Once the grass is cut green pastures turn gold, striped with patterns. Today, farm workers drive red tractors to and fro, turning cut grass, then a baler follows and collects it When it's full the tractor pauses and a bale opens to emit a bale of grass.
I sit by rock roses close to the cliff-edge and watch as each time the tractor crosses the pasture a new bale is dumped and their numbers grow In nearby pastures bales are already wrapped in black plastic which makes them air-tight so fermentation will begin. Once most of the strips of cut grass have been gathered and made into bales another tractor comes and its trailer somehow wraps each bale within a black plastic covering. I find it mesmerising. As a photographer, I love to take images of their work and those field-patterns don't last long so I work quickly. Not work, compared with what the farmers are doing. I like this scene of silage or haylage being made, fodder for dairy cattle who provide milk, cheese and yogurt. It's good to see the different stages and all the work that goes into the making of our food. I watch those specialist trailers and realise I don't know their names or how they work. What is going on in the internal workings of a baler that emits bales like a hen laying eggs!! An image a farmer and tractor enthusiast might find ridiculous. Although what happens to a bird's egg as it travels through the oviduct is a mystery and a marvel. The soft shell has to become hard and the DNA of each species determines a unique colour and pattern inscribed onto the shell. .
6th June 2024 marks 80 years since the D Day landings and the media has a range of programmes to commemorate the event. In the years following the Second World War there was a realisation that more children were living in towns and cities, increasingly detached from an understanding of farming, of sustainability, of where their food came from. The Ladybird Books aimed specifically to address this need, with pocket-sized books on Nature and people at work, including farmers. They've become collectors items, a snapshot of farming in the 1940s. Beautifully illustrated, they show not only livestock but flora and fauna to be found on farmland. If only lapwing, curlew and skylark were still so abundant.
Barrowfield Farm has pastures extending south, in the direction of Morecambe Bay, and with a view north toward the Lake District Fells. Its pastures lie at the foot of Scout Scar escarpment, where springs issue from the limestone. The lanes linking pastures are named Moss Lane, this was a landscape of mosses. It's peat, was wetland before Enclosure when it was drained. One of my images shows limestone clitter near the escarpment edge where hoary rock rose and common rock rose and yellow vetches make the cliff-edge a mass of yellow flowers in early June. Blue moor grass has grown tall and gone to seed and I go for images taken through a screen of wild grasses, looking down onto pastures where cultivated grasses best suited to make silage are grown.
On 1st June I heard a cuckoo calling in Honeybee Woods down in the Lyth Valley. Cuckoo would have been more abundant back in the 1940s. This was my 7th cuckoo hearing of 2024 but I've yet to see one- and even ten years ago they were more plentiful. (7 hearings, not 7 cuckoo). Redstart are less easy to find this year and I know their song. I found a fly orchid today. I'm sure there will be a few more but they are hard to spot. Found my first butterfly orchid today too. Dropwort is budding and the first flowers show. Dark Red Helleborine is leafy and buds are forming. Mountain everlasting is in flower. With ash die back many ash are leafless, skeletal. Gorse on Bradleyfield Allotment is browned-off and not thriving. I have yet to hear and see linnet although I'm hearing lesser redpoll frequently.
I wonder how Scout Scar might have looked on D Day, 6th June 1944. President Zelensky is present in France to commemorate D Day and to remind us that war rages in Ukraine.
On Scout Scar all is quiet. The red tractors have gone, the black bales of silage are stored and pattern is gone from the pastures. Tomaz Shafernaker tells us that today's weather mirrors the weather on the Normandy coast on D Day. Here in Cumbria there's sunlight and showers and new flowers come in a rush. Dropwort is suddenly everywhere, and white bedstraws with a few hints of yellow lady's bedstraw to come. Small flowers of bugle appear. Early purple orchids are faded and white butterfly orchids show. I find my first fragrant orchid, more delicate than the robust early purples. And the first scabious are in flower. Skylark are in song, and redpoll. Still no linnet and no cuckoo today. A skein of geese flies north.
On Scout Scar all is quiet. The red tractors have gone, the black bales of silage are stored and pattern is gone from the pastures. Tomaz Shafernaker tells us that today's weather mirrors the weather on the Normandy coast on D Day. Here in Cumbria there's sunlight and showers and new flowers come in a rush. Dropwort is suddenly everywhere, and white bedstraws with a few hints of yellow lady's bedstraw to come. Small flowers of bugle appear. Early purple orchids are faded and white butterfly orchids show. I find my first fragrant orchid, more delicate than the robust early purples. And the first scabious are in flower. Skylark are in song, and redpoll. Still no linnet and no cuckoo today. A skein of geese flies north.
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