Lady Booth Brook offers a canny and less frequented route up to the fabled plateau of Kinder Scout. A “booth” was a cattle farm, also known as a vaccary, a common feature in the medieval Pennines. The lady I don’t know. The modern farm is Nether Booth, where a track leads north beside the stream, past some gnarled and venerable alders, to Edale’s youth hostel and then a steep gorge, which the path outflanks.
Above this, the hillside relaxes into a delightful bowl and is filled, at this time of year, with curlew song: the reason we had come. You gain height quickly this way, but we kept stopping to absorb the quickening ripple of song from a distant curlew that periodically took off to circle the cwm, floating briefly as it settled back on the ground.
Lifted skywards in this way, we paused on the plateau’s brink to look south across the tops of Losehill and Mam Tor and then, less nimbly than the curlew, began our own descent.
By the time we regained the farm, the sky had darkened and rain was starting. The gloom was deepened by the clattering alarm of a mistle thrush landing in the topmost branches of a tall sycamore. A handful of crows scattered against the blackening sky. On power lines 30 yards from the sycamore, another mistle thrush began rattling like its mate in the treetop. Near it, slighter and less dumpy, was a starling. As one, they quit their perch and flew towards the sycamore.
As they did so, the ratchet phrases of the mistle thrush were quoted back at it by the starling in near perfect mimicry. We stood there, necks craned as the scene unwound. When the thrush and starling reached the sycamore, a sparrowhawk rose from behind the tree and circled away to the north; the starling followed, reaching for the spread tail of the raptor, which wheeled higher and then slid westwards towards the head of the dale.
The thrushes hunkered on their nest, the voice-artist starling returned to its wire and we two, laughing in surprise, passed the farm in the softening rain.
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