“Last week I was in Ilkley,” the waller tells me, “and had some lovely sandstone, but I’m making the best of this.”
The irregular fragments of limestone in the Greenfield Valley, Upper Wharfedale, don’t stack up as neat layers but there’s plenty of material available. Another waller is repairing a section and he simply digs up a piece he needs from the turf alongside the wall.
The hogget hole allows sheep to pass through. This one can be blocked by the slab lying beside the wall on the roadside verge. A hogget is a young sheep.
Wether Fell, seen from the causey stone path behind the Wensleydale Creamery. Gayle Beck at the foot of the slope in the foreground. A Roman road runs along the top of the fell.
I’m reading David Joy’s 2019 book Discover Your Woods, Trees in the Dales so this afternoon I had a walk around Bilberry Wood here as Nethergill Farm. There are pines, larches and firs but the only broadleaved species that I notice is rowan.
Birch, Goat Gap Cafe, Newby, 4/9/20
Rushes and sphagnum moss grow in the damper areas, with heather and polytrichum mosses on drier hummocks.
At the more exposed western corner of the wood, a swathe of pines has been flattened, the fallen trees revealing that they were shallow rooted.
The only bird that I notice is a wren, flitting about amongst the ground vegetation and it appears that a wren spotted my iPhone which I’d set to take a time-lapse sequence, flashing on the screen for a single frame.
Bumblebee on Devil’s-Bit Scabious
There are ferns, bracken and a few brambles but the ground layer consists predominantly of various kinds of mosses. Tormentil straggles around, dotting the ground with its four-petalled yellow flowers.
Squeeze stile on the causey stone path, between Gayle and Hawes church.
There are a few fungi and, as the name of the wood suggests, plenty of bilberry.
