Country diary: A stony desert in the heart of the Peaks - and it's thriving

Longstone Edge, Derbyshire: A lot of work has gone into making this a place of infertile land yet abundant wildlife. And pride of place goes to the rare spined mason beeGlance north as you walk east-west over this ridge and my guess is that few would see much to lure them into the landscape beyond the fence. Perhaps just as well, given the lack of public access, but you'd be wrong about any absence of interest.Deep Rake is an old industrial place and the Explorer OL24 map still mentions "opencast workings?. While these have gone, you can still see the concentric drag lines through the limestone gravel where some heavy land-sculpting plant has operated. Between the machined lines, which are liberally peppered with a thousand dead white snail shells, there's a spartan greenery dominated by bird's-foot trefoil and hawkweed and the odd stately spiralling upwards of woolly, spear and creeping thistles. Continue reading...