Hogshaw Brook, which runs below my late mother’s house, is part of the very first landscape in my story as a naturalist. Every night when I went to bed, I’d hear its ceaseless journey to join the river Wye. I remember one year how we dammed it by the bridge where the dippers bred, and its four-inch flow rose eventually up to the heaving chest of my nine-year-old self. We swam in it that summer, along with its tiddler brown trout and the caddis fly larvae that we loved to uncover beneath the cold stones.
The fields around the brook were grazed by cattle and the banks always shorn to the quick, so that the few flowers we picked for my mother – lady’s smock (among her favourites), meadow buttercups, St John’s wort and the odd orchid – were always taken from the rush-filled bogs on the wettest spots.
In the 1980s, the cattle were withdrawn and the grazing given over to sheep, which stayed away from the wet ground. I remember noting exactly 30 years ago how the orchids had expanded their province, venturing onto the drier fields, while the wet flushes had become a rising tide of greater bird’s foot trefoil, marsh bedstraw and ragwort.
This year, as in previous years, there has been no livestock. But instead of merely noting the orchids through binoculars from the house window, I went to inspect the old spots properly.
How they’ve changed. There were 90 orchid spikes in one modest plot of ground and some were vulgar cones of lipstick pink bulging out the ooze. The wider bogs were a rainforest of marsh thistle, valerian, foxgloves and sheep’s sorrel and around the horizon of flowerheads were five species of bumblebee and a couple of hoverflies that are bright-coloured bee mimics: Volucella bombylans and Leucozona lucorum.
Had it been like this 50 years ago I guess it would have been declared a site of special scientific interest and given legal protection.
Today, it is as good as many nature reserves. It is a classic example of how places can change but also how they can improve when pressure is reduced and humans look the other way for a few decades.
