Neglect has left the wooden barrack-like building looking gaunt and frankly sinister. A sky of torn clouds, a sea of rough, rust-coloured pasture, a few knotty hawthorns and some lonely telegraph poles complete the Yorkshire Gothic ambience; it could be a backdrop to a horror film.
Yet this is Doug Simpson’s preferred patch for a wander. Best known for overseeing the successful reintroduction of red kites to Yorkshire, he looks at this windswept, indefinite area of “unofficial countryside” in Haverah Park, near Harrogate, through the eyes of an ornithologist.
Until 1993, the building was actually part of a groundbreaking Leeds University experiment to study cosmic rays hitting the Earth’s atmosphere; the origins of these near-light-speed particles, which emanate from beyond the solar system, remain mysterious. More discomfiting are the eavesdropping orbs of the Menwith Hill listening station, their presence three miles away a reminder of the absurdities of the nuclear age.
The restless spirit of modernity haunts and unsettles the landscape here in various ways. It lacks the carefully tended quality of a national park; in fact it has no formal conservation designation. Mostly it is an unglamorous fringeland of rush pasture, purple moor grass and “white moor”, yet nature, of course, finds a use for it; on one recent visit Doug recorded around 1,000 golden plover.
He also tells me of hen harrier fly-bys, and grimly predictable raptor persecution on nearby grouse moors, including a recent troubling spike in red kite poisonings.
Doug has applied for the area to be designated a site of nature conservation interest, a lengthy process, but he is used to adopting time-consuming causes for seemingly small gains. He recently spent 30 shifts, of several hours each, guarding a little ringed plover nest that had appeared on the busy banks of Eccup Reservoir, near Leeds. “I rated the one chick that fledged an incredible success,” he says.
While we are talking, a sound silences us mid-flow; one, then two, then three skylarks rise up for early displays, the first either of us have experienced this year, the trilling song re-firing synapses associated with summer on a brisk February day.
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