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Wainwright's Coast to Coast impacts on flora and fauna

5/6/2016

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PictureSeasonal route: May to July on the Coast to Coast
​Magic and degradation meet here.  Wainwright’s Coast to Coast Walk is so popular the route is under unsustainable pressure .  A notice  asking  walkers to take a  seasonal route is staked into eroded ground  on the border of Cumbria and Yorkshire.  Bare earth,  dried out and deeply cracked, peat hags of softly crumbling dark peat,  drying to dust.   In wet weather  we’d be deep in  mud. To protect this landscape for the future we're asked to keep to the route of the season.  It’s an urgent message and The Yorkshire Dales National Park gives a reasoned request . No dogs on this stretch, it’s important habitat for ground-nesting birds.  So, what is the magic we don't want to lose? 

Signposts showing two of the three distinct seasonal routes on the Coast to Coast path. With the notice telling of erosion and damage to vegetation and vulnerable ground-nesting birds, specifically between Nine Standards Rigg and Ravenseat.  Peat hags and erosion show behind the notice and in the landscape. 
Listen,  skylark and curlew are making music over the moor.  Listen and you may hear the plaintive note of golden plover.  The day is hot, with  a welcome  hint of  breeze.  The mud has dried out and crisped  vegetation crunches underfoot.  Scan the horizon for golden plover  through seed-heads  like tiny white prayer flags.  Golden plover forage  amongst tussocks of hare’s-tail cotton grass, the greenish-gold mantle of the bird almost lost in  moorland grasses.   It’s magical to glimpse  the bird dipping through plumes of white .  
Down to earth and peering into  peat bog habitat , there are tiny flowers deep amongst crowberry and the short heather the golden plover love.  The birds feed on insects, seeds and berries.  They love sphagnum moss, one of my favourite things. The subtlety of its colours is beautiful and as the surface layer dries out the muted shades blend into each other .  
​Cloudberry is special to the North Pennines, to the eastern fells of Cumbria.  And it is commemorated  in place names under its alias: knoutberry.   Knoutberry Haw, Knoutberry Gill at Ravenseat, Knoutberry Currack and Knoutberry on Ravenstonedale Common.  The plant is budding and amongst all the crinkled and fresh  green leaves are a few white flowers.  The petals fall to leave behind a pink calyx .  Beetles and ants are busy pollinating.  Cloud berry, Knoutberry, Rubus Chamaemorus is the Latin name. I’m revelling in fresh cloudberry flowers with golden plover and plotting them on  my personal map of flora and fauna. 
Beinn Dubh and Beinn Luskentyre, Harris, with golden plover    10 July 2015     
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    Jan Wiltshire is a nature writer living in Cumbria. She also explores islands and coast and the wildlife experience. (See Home and My Books)

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