Anyone looking at the largely treeless slopes that flank the middle section of this dale is dazzled at this season by the rippling weave of sunshine yellow. It is stitched together from thousands of bird’s-foot trefoil, cat’s-ear, hawkbit and kidney vetch blooms, then further studded with the lavender of wild thyme and bolts of red clover. The whole is intoxicating, and its visual and chemical sweetness are then threaded with nectaring bumblebees and butterflies: common blues, small skippers and dark green fritillaries.
The last are the most satisfying but also, in a curious way, the most troubling. The first response draws on the fact that as a child I never once saw the species in Derbyshire. I was 30 before I first clapped eyes on one here. Now it is almost abundant in some limestone areas, and at Coombs Dale there are adults in all stages, from the burning orange of freshly emerged imagos right through to the rain-battered beige of butterflies at the end of their days. For all the intensity of the wings, it’s the micro details from which I glean the deepest pleasure: the silver spots inserted into the sage-green on their hindwings’ underside, and then the ladybird-like spotting on those huge compound eyes.
What’s troubling about this fritillary abundance is that it’s almost certainly a symptom of climate change – the same process that’s partly driving willow warblers and spotted flycatchers from the same place. For now, however, I’m taking the insects’ greater numbers as a win. More cheering still is the fact that this blessed slope hasn’t always looked like a pristine wilderness, it has been founded on the bones of an old industry.
The sward has sprung up on the tailings of an old lead mine, and if you search carefully across it, you often find bits of old iron rod spiring up among the flowers. Even more bizarre is that one very rare plant growing here is a specialist that seems to thrive where the lead and other pollution is particularly toxic. No matter what we do, it seems, life abides. I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that.
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