Chew Valley is patched with unexpected gold: though they look like fields of September stubble, these are actually pastures, tanned by the perpetual sun. I visit Folly Farm on one of the last days of drought, and as I open the gate a buzzard and a raven appear, as if they spy a potential victim of thirst.
I was expecting the anthills to have turned brown, but it is worse than this. Many have developed bald pates, their normally healthy heads of green herbs lost to the age of this drought. The grasses have died back to a few whiskery strands, and I can’t see any wild thyme at all. I walk on, disconcerted. Cows have been and gone (the pats are as flat and dry as old parchment), and black knapweed and betony are managing to sprout and flower from nibbled stems. But the plants are impoverished and there is no profusion of flowers: the clay has baked into cracks, the heat is boiling up from the ground as much as it is bearing down from the sky.
The course of the little stream has dried into a grim, claggy mass, like piles of discards from a fussy potter. The stream is notorious for eating hikers whole, but I cross safely by balancing on the dried tussocks. As I pass, dozens of insects rise in a hum and a clatter. Butterflies, hoverflies, bees and wasps have been feeding on minerals in the damp, cow-trodden hollows or perhaps managing to wring out a sip of water. But even sun-loving insects suffer in this heat as their food plants wither and nectar sources dry up.
Looking closer at the anthills, I realise that some plants are fighting back: lady’s bedstraw and bird’s-foot trefoil are sprouting eager leaves and golden flowers, fresh and bold against the dull mounds. I am amazed at their vigour – this heat is heartless, it scorches, beats down and flattens everything.
And now at last I wake to rain. I am confined to the house today but I long to go back to see the plants revive and reawaken, knowing that some have already stolen a march on the others.
