Skippers and kings in the chalk rubble reserve

Rainbow over Bloody Oaks Quarry. Photograph: Matt Shardlow

This tiny nature reserve, a long thin quarry, is no bigger than two football pitches, yet it is an essential home for many types of plants and animals. The colourful name apparently dates back to the Wars of the Roses and a 1470 battle between the Yorkist King Edward IV and the Lancastrian Welles family. The king opened by beheading Lord Welles, then launched a volley of new-fangled cannon fire, causing a rout, and concluded by slaughtering captured Lancastrians in the nearby wood.

Chalk milkwort at the quarry. Photograph: Matt Shardlow

However, this reserve’s importance has nothing to do with trees and everything to do with the exposed limestone rubble and open, flowery, habitats. Somewhere among the mounds I am hoping to find chalk milkwort (Polygala calcarea), a delicate herb of lime-rich grassland that bears royal blue, lentil-sized, flowers. Other than at this sanctuary this plant is more of a southern plant; its next nearest home is 70 miles away, in the Chilterns.

But my search is interrupted by a sudden downpour, the first of several that have brought welcome relief to the parched crops.

I huddle under a large hawthorn and notice that, up close, the faintly pleasant perfume of its blossom becomes uncomfortably similar to the rubbery whiff of new doggie toy bones.

White-ribbon hoverfly at Bloody Oaks Quarry. Photograph: Matt Shardlow

I have company in the refuge – a pretty white-ribbon hoverfly (Leucozona lucorum) finds respite on a glistening hawthorn leaf, while at the base of the tree each creeping buttercup, buffeted by great globs of rain, contains a little ring of Ocherous raspberry beetles (Byturus ochraceus) tightly clasped around the central pistil.

Dingy skipper at the quarry. Photograph: Matt Shardlow

When the rain eases I emerge to a welcoming rainbow, and there under its arch I strike gold: sitting on a salad burnet flower head is a dingy skipper (Erynnis tages), another of the reserve’s specialist species.

Beneath this white and mousy mottled butterfly is a short carpet of horseshoe vetch, its probable food plant. And among the vetch I find the chalk milkwort.

This extra special habitat patch would fit on half a volleyball court. I hope that nearby active quarries will accommodate a future for these species and that the land will not be meekly sanitised as arable or amenity grassland.

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