The entrance is easy to miss: an understated wooden sign roughly halfway along the main road traversing Devon north to south. From the turning beside an abandoned rail station a quiet lane that once shuddered under the weight of heavy diggers leads to a car park at Meeth Quarry where I join 20 or so Devon Wildlife Trust members for a field trip.
While the others may have come to enjoy the variety of flora and fauna thriving at this relatively new nature reserve, I have one species on my mind – a delicate national rarity that endured here as the land about it was torn apart.
For nearly a century rich seams of clay were clawed from this rolling terrain until quarrying ceased in 2004. The deep basins have since filled with water, vegetation has softened hard edges, and the pale scars in the land are beginning to heal.
A main path skirts the lakes, running between stands of trees, and we stop now and again to point out birds and puzzle over plants. Morning rain has eased, but few insects are stirring.
I’m prepared for disappointment. Then a gap in the clouds allows the sun to work its magic, and the rising temperature teases winged life from the undergrowth.
Up ahead I spot the first butterfly of the morning and it looks promising: a small white species flying weakly at knee height. It settles amid the grass, pale folded forewings lightly dusted with grey and unusually rounded, as if shaped using a stencil.
I have been rewarded sooner than expected. This is the wood white (Leptidea sinapis), the scarcest of our white butterflies and my first sighting of this endangered species.
Habitat changes and a decline in coppicing have left us with only scattered populations of this dainty creature that lives in the kind of sheltered scrub and woodland glades found here.
The lone individual before me, wings thin as cigarette paper, seems such a fragile thing to be battling for survival. I wish it well as it takes to the air once again, a light snippet of life fluttering low and unhurried over the path-side foliage.
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