Hills, Holes and Hollow Ways.

Pasque flowers

Easter time is normally when we look for the first cowslips and primroses but the real Easter plant is the pasqueflower and you can only find them on the short-cropped turf of a few chalk and limestone downs. Luckily, we have such a place near-by at Barnack; it's a national nature reserve called "Hills and Holes" and we go there a lot.

Hanna and I noticed masses of small cowslips by the road near our home and we took this as a sign that we were in with a chance of seeing pasqueflowers and so we made our first visit of 2012 today. It's just 30 minutes up the Great North Road (now the A1 Motorway) but we prefer to make a detour through the pretty, stone villages north of Peterborough where there is no traffic, the fields are full of lambs and there is always a buzzard or kite overhead.

Hills and Holes

We nearly always park just outside the village in a little quarry that betrays the origins of the site. This is where a lot of the limestone for local buildings, including churches and cathedrals was quarried in Medieval times. We emerged onto the open, undulating turf to see............not very much, actually. The two-year drought and a really cold spring had held things back. We wandered around like spaniels; sniffing out likely spots on south-facing banks and hollows and in clumps of longer turf, but at first we only found cowslips and violets.

A lone peacock butterfly settled on the path ahead of us and we became a aware of a host of tiny bees and wasps near a wild plum tree that was spectacularlyy blooming all on its own.

A wild plum tree

Hanna remarked that a visitor from the tropics would think of us as absolutely barmy to be enjoying the search for a couple of flowers in a seemingly barren landscape, but it's all about scale. That short turf is composed of up to 20 plant species in a square foot and some of them are quite rare. Ant hills are covered in crossword, eye-brights, wild thyme and speedwells, while other areas have Carline thistles, violets, vetches and many more species; none of which are in flower yet. The joy for us is that there will be a successsion of little gems such as orchids for us to photograph throughout the summer right up to the autumn gentians in September. There will be butterflies, moths and hopefully glow-worms too.

Today we had hoped for a few summer migrant birds, but we only saw swallows, robins and linnets on the reserve. A lonely willow warbler was singing his heart out at the quarry where we had parked.

Pasqueflowers are very striking when you focus on them but really don't jump out at you unless you lie down and scan the ridges. Once we got to the right patch and saw a few, we found hundreds. The best is probably yet to come, but we had a lovely time poking around and working up an appetite for lunch. We both remarked that we don't do this enough and it really is what we enjoy most; sauntering, dallying, peeking, nature-watching, burbling, photographing and going to a pub!

Unfortunately for us, the charming, stone pub in the village had stopped serving food while we dallied and burbled so we drove into Stamford and had an excellent breakfast at 3.30 pm! The Cosy Club is one of a new chain of themed eateries, so I was a bit dubious about it, but at least it served food all day. I have to say it was really good, with quite a short but decent menu.  We must take guests there in future.

Hanna on the Roman road that ran between
Londinium and Hadrian's Wall.

On our way home, we again avoided the modern motorway and took the lanes southward where we stopped at a tiny local nature reserve, run by the Wildlife Trust. Like Hills and Holes it is on limestone, but the site is less well-drained and so has a slightly different species mix. Its is also grazed by cattle rather than sheep. It's a charming little site with a huge badger sett, hedgerows and the marks of a ancient trackway running across it. We were surprised to learn that this track was a but of Ermine Street; the old Roman road that goes north through most of the towns round here and was the original Great North Road that ran from London to Edinburgh. The modern road avoids towns an villages but the old road ran through them, spawning businesses such as stabling, smithies, coaching inns and markets at places such as St. Neots, Buckden, Stilton and Stamford. The classic, Georgian coach route that was so well known to travellers and highwaymen such as Dick Turpin didn't always stick to the older Roman route. In fact, they probably created detours around muddy, rutted stretches creating seasonal bypasses or parallel routes. The short stretch of Roman road we walked was certainly rutted and braided so that it was hard to see where the main track was, but it was certainly a well used route in by-gone days.