Compare the old and new maps of this area north of Buxton and you’ll notice how the valley’s wedge-shaped bloc of blue has morphed into a line threaded through several blue specks. Those cartographic changes reflect a heart-warming story of how toads can alter whole landscapes.
The wedge-shaped bloc was once a reservoir and, when it was decommissioned by Severn Trent, the company was highly sensitive to local wishes that Lightwood’s wildlife should be accommodated. The map’s blue spots now mark the presence of three wonderful ponds that ensure the survival of its toads and frogs.
This morning toads are everywhere. While their relatives bred last month and left a great loll of frogspawn to swamp one entire bay of the pool, the toads are just arriving. One woman we met spoke of thousands trooping towards it last week. At any moment there are scores bubbled up at the surface, their copper eyes flaring among the forests of water mint.
Toad sex is a weird ferment of life and death. The females, which are huge compared with their multiple mates, act like magnets for all that testosterone. Soon each is entirely smothered in male flesh, so that they writhe as a single mud globe. Sometimes they sink to the bottom and routinely she’s drowned. We spotted several females, all spread-eagled and upside-down and ghostly angel-white in the murk.
Eventually we became connoisseurs of these mating masses: four or five together were little more than embryonic; a bolus of eight might hold us briefly, but the real toad ball would number about a dozen. These miniature planets of flesh revolved like some strange inkblot test that lured scattergun associations from us: out popped Aristophanes, then Thoreau’s Walden, Richard Kerridge’s Cold Blood. The sad wide-mouthed smiles of the males had a hint of young croc or, at the other end of the spectrum, Charles Laughton’s bulbous mug in Hobson’s Choice.
Toads are disgusting and mesmerising all at once, yet mingled with sunlight and thrush song and the flaring yellow bolts of coltsfoot spiking out the Earth, they reassure us that life and Lightwood are all good and exactly as they should be.
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