Spring flowers on Scout Scar

Blackthorn buds and first flowers

Soon the Scout Scar scrub will be white with blackthorn flowers.  There's a tallish shrub which always flowers first so I seek it out to find it rich in fat creamy flower buds opening with a flourish of pollen tipped anthers.  The day is warm and bright so pollinators will be on the wing.  The reddish branches are patterned with pale lichens so it's a fine study. 
Two days ago I heard my first willow warbler. Now they're calling everywhere. I hear redpoll and I think I catch a single note of linnet which returns from overwintering on the coast to breed here in spring. 

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Where blackthorn grows prostrate on limestone clitter it looks wintry still.   In more exposed locations flowering is some way off.
There are seasonal specials up here and I look for the red flowers on larch whose structure  reminds me of pineapples.  I look and look, finding none until I reach Helsington Barrows where they show on a few trees.  Some years larch flowers do not appear, I've tried to find out why but have not  yet succeeded.  I'll ask a forester friend.

Blue moor grass is abundant on Scout Scar but it isn't conspicuous.  Flowering early, its stems are short so it's close to the earth, best seen in the finely-worked soil of anthills and when it shows against limestone clitter.  Flowers are steely blue but under the warm sun they open and are  golden with pollen.  I lie on the ground to take photographs and a breeze flutters a shower of  seeds- each one attached by a fine thread.  Often flower-structure shows well in shadows which complement the flower itself, a different perspective. 

Skylark and meadow pipit are singing and I glimpse my first brimstone butterfly of the season.  By mid-day its hotting-up and you can feel an acceleration in the coming of spring. 

The final image shows the construction of a stretch of footway from Brigsteer Rise to Stainbank Green.  Rising above it, the embankment which has been cut back so the road is wide enough to accommodate a footway.   It has taken ten years of campaigning to achieve this footway which should enable pedestrians to walk safely up the Brigsteer Road to Scout Scar and the Lake District National Park.  The Nature Cure is essential to our well-being, that's well known.  Locals  walk this way often, we have long done so, and in campaigning for this footway we insist on our right to do so.  When housing development began there had been no thought given to how local residents use what was a county road and a network of footpaths leading to Scout Scar, and the importance of protecting them and giving us safe access via needful routes we use daily.  This issue can occur  whenever developers move in, it's a microcosm, a picture of what can happen anywhere in the UK.