Plantlife update

Looking back on Sunday's working job I can reflect on what a good day we had. It wasn't cold, it wasn't too wet and it wasn't windy.

Ten of us were out on the side of Deep Dale including four members of the Derbyshire Dales Group of the Ramblers' Association. Some of those four are also members of Plantlife and Derbyshire Wildlife Trust - there's a fair bit of cross-fertilisation.

We hacked at and cut down hawthorn and hazel so that the precious limestone grassland isn't over-run. Alan [pictured] was the Peak Park Ranger in control and once he'd got the fire going he tended this for most of the day.

You can see from the picture that we were working on quite a steep slope which made dragging cut hawthorn in particular difficult.

Some of us finished off at 2.15pm and by the time we had got down to the car park [near the road in the photo] we could see others were starting to wend their way down the bankside.

Plantlife who own the dale need more members so visit their website if you're interested in wildflowers - their website is at http://www.plantlife.org.uk/. They are undertaking a survey in May to calculate how many Early Flowering Orchids there are in this one reserve - they believe there are a million cowslips and they think there may be about the same number of Orchids.

Back home I counted the small puncture wounds where the hawthorn had retaliated as it was being cut down.