Country diary: A bird's-eye view of wagtails and martins

Miller's Dale, Derbyshire: There's a lot to be said for getting up high and broadening the viewFresh perspectives on the familiar are always rewarding. Out botanising in the late afternoon, we found ourselves scrambling up the steep south side of this deep-cut dale until we were almost at its crest, and I realised that I had never seen the valley from this angle before.We found flowers in abundance: creeping thyme and heath bedstraw, moonwort, rockroses, orange-flecked inside their yellow cups, and kidney vetch gone to seed. Likewise the cowslips, those "keys of heaven" that at Easter were nodding in the breeze but now stood upright at attention, their gentle yellow flowers turned brown and hard. We also found what we were looking for: sandwort, though not much of it, fringing the Stygian gloom of old lead-mine shafts. Continue reading...