Summer is damply fading into Autumn, in the hedgerows the crimson hawthorn berries and flecked bodies of garden cross orbweavers are waxing to their utmost rotundity, while arable fields are in various stages of undress and reclothing.
Rutland is a small county – so small it has only half a member of parliament – with a rural, even quaint reputation; one to which the countryside around Lyddington conforms. Hills big enough to have names, including Prestley Hill, Bee Hill and the Barrows, frame the broad vale of the river Welland.
The land is dense with fields, hedgerows and a generous scatter of trees. Lyddington itself is steeped in history, and was mostly constructed during that history from orange ironstone topped with grey slate or thatch, all fastidiously maintained and presented.
There is a desperate struggle in the soon-to-be-flowering ivy. A garden cross orbweaver has ensnared a German wasp and she is wrapping her in a swaddling of silk, but the wasp has yet to concede, her jaws snip through the silk, she writhes, but her limbs are bound. The spider bites her back again and again, then retreats to let the venom do its work.
The farming is mixed, with beans, rape and wheat alongside sheep and cattle. The latter fields are strewn with cow pats, the older ones often peppered with wheat-grain-sized holes. These are the exit tunnels of Tic Tac shaped Aphodius dung beetles.
Poking around in the greenish sludge of a fresh pat reveals a wealth of beetle life, the large black Aphodius fossor, the smaller straw and black mottled A contaminatus, long thin jet rove beetles and the spotted dung beetle (Sphaeridium sp.), the latter a broader beetle that paddles and swims through sloppy dung.
A recent study by Sarah Beynon and Aberystwyth University estimates a value for the work dung beetles do clearing British pastures and fertilising soils. It is £367m every year – all free. If they were not poisoned by toxic worming medicines they might contribute an additional £6.2m.
• Forty Years on the Welsh Bird Islands, the 2015 memorial lecture in honour of the late Country diarist William Condry, will be given in Machynlleth on 3 October by Professor Tim Birkhead.
