Excited chatter bounces off the amphitheatre's great walls, syncopates with screech of trekking poles on rock-pavement. This nature reserve in vast old quarries that straddle the Wales-England border seldom enjoys the accomplished silence of most abandoned industrial sites in Wales. Traffic-roar from the busy trunk road below amplifies against plane surfaces of pale grey limestone, mutters away like threat of thunder into the flat mere country eastwards. I walk from a lane where dog-rose is still in brief, frail bloom, take a skittery path past a plethora of official do-not signs, and investigate what's happening up there.
The answer soon accosts me with gusto and levity – ladies of a certain age on a weekly botanical outing, a score of them, at least, jollying their way among old spoil heaps, lancing inquisitorial comments at this solitary male who's intruded on their temporary domain. "Have you seen the pyramidals? Glorious this year!" they ask gaily, carborundum-tipped poles waving to where the quarry floor's a shimmer of purest pink, late-flowering pyramidal orchids prolifically scattered across it. I kneel with a hand-lens to look more closely at the intricacy of what Darwin, for whom orchids were an early love, called "a very beautiful example of perfect adjustment in all respects to pollination by butterflies and moths". Their delicate fragrance greets me. Grizzled skipper butterflies bask on sun-warmed grass, wings wide open. Clouded yellows fly past swift and low. The spoil-heaps behind hold a memory. "There is perhaps no greater thrill than that experienced by the nature-lover when he sees his first bee orchid," wrote VS Summerhayes in his standard work on British wild orchids. Will I be lucky enough to find these capricious, startling flowers here today?
Trowel marks in the turf reveal where some collector's dug them up. Disconsolate, I slip away, meet the alpha female of the botanical group sitting pensively on a bench at the belvedere, close to tears. With growing them near impossible, the theft of these orchids is an act of wanton destruction: senseless and brutal as wildfowlers shooting golden plovers; worse even than Victorian fern-collecting, where at least a plea of ignorance could be entered. When will we quit our murderous acquisitive habit, and learn simply to take delight?
