The road between Abney and Bretton had been closed for much of the summer as a landslip was repaired. The ground hereabouts is wormed through with faults and weaknesses, a legacy of shale rocks and local lead mining. It’s a boundary of sorts, between limestone country to the south and dark gritstone moors to the north, a place of geomantic charm and mystery, hidden corners and unexpected angles.
Now the road was open again, offering some of the best views in the Peak District. I stopped at a remote cottage where a rough footpath led down into the head of Bretton Clough.
To the north of me was an elegant matrix of walls and emerald fields below Cockey Farm, itself tucked pleasingly into the rumpled shoulder of Abney Low. To my right was a patch of rough moor whose thin soil and steep ground must have made enclosure a waste of effort. Hidden nearby was an ancient well and to the east Eyam Moor with its bronze age stone circle half lost in the heather.
The trees just here are always full of birds. There’s gorse and plenty of tree cover: alder and willow in the wet flushes, beech and sycamore near the cottage, which, I noticed, had generous rations on offer.
Teams of goldfinches, chaffinches and tits were working in rotation at several hanging feeders.
A woodpecker watched from the trees. A siskin hopped below for scraps, then a female greenfinch, and then a brambling. In the birches behind me a blackbird clucked softly and I turned as some fieldfares alighted. It was almost too much.
Then the homeowner arrived, not in the least concerned to find a stranger scanning the back of his property. It was, he said, always this busy, since his wife put up the feeders. “You see them coming up out of the valley each morning,” he told me, as though describing a Mongol horde.
I moved on, up a rough track, glancing across scrubby fields to see a sparrowhawk sweep through my field of my vision and settle watchfully in a tree. A rising tide, it seems, really does float all boats.
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