A cooler grey start to the day. I grab my jacket as I step out under dark clouds and with a feeling that it’s about to rain. No butterflies on the wing, which makes me think that they’ve got the same idea!
It’s quiet in the meadows. No birds in sight, but occasionally sounding from the field margins. The odd churr from a Magpie, wheezing Greenfinch, and a chirping Wren.
South Field is brimming with colour: Red Clover, purple Selfheal, yellow Agrimony and Buttercups and the white umbelliferous Wild Carrot and Corky-fruited Water-dropwort. All sitting below the floating Meadow Barley seed heads.
I pass through the gate into Saxon. Bittersweet clambering up the hedge of flowering Bramble, alongside some particularly tall Scabious poking out the top. These flowers a magnet for an abundance of Six-spot Burnet this past week.
Crickets whirr as I pass mound after mound of Yellow Meadow Ant hills. On a much smaller scale, little mounds of dirt surround Mining Bee holes underfoot. A flutter above me where a small charm of Goldfinch swoop by. A Skylark breaks into song in the distance.
Moving into Johnston Meadow, I was sad to see a dog stood still in the middle of the field – one of Skylark nesting grounds. The owner was upset that a usually well-behaved dog had ran off and wouldn’t come back. It had found something that it refused to leave. A reminder that all of Skylark meadows have signs to keep all dogs on leads (even usually well-trained ones) to protect these birds.
It finally spits with rain as I find the cows grazing the coastal slopes. The turf is now been chomped down low, leaving a patchwork of plants either too spikey or too unpalatable for the Herefords: tall spindly Ragwort stems topped with yellow flowers, swathes of Spear Thistle with their fluffy purple blooms, and flowerless Gorse regrowth.
Even more quiet along the clifftop with the final Guillemot chicks having fledged and not one of 1000-strong colony in sight. Just a few Herring Gulls, a Shag, and Rock Pipits over the wall.