Where have the ravens on Raven Crag gone? I ask, puzzled, scrutinising the baby Matterhorn on Fleetwith Pike from Gatesgarth Farm at the head of Buttermere. “Honister Crag is where,” answers Willie Richardson. “Oh, and Haystacks,” the retired shepherd adds, nodding towards the fells opposite the dale head, which always make me think of Monet’s haystacks. That’s local knowledge for you (the farm had been his home for 59 years).
He reckons that sparrowhawks are nesting in a holly bush on the rock-face, scaring off the birds that gave the crag its name.
There are no chaffinches at the bird feeders above Gatesgarth cottage’s flowerbeds today, either. And no blue tits pecking at cobwebs for spiders. They know that predators are in the vicinity, he says.
Stonechats like black-headed robins suddenly rise from the lowest flanks of Robinson, amid a cacophony of yelping. “Game on!” Willie says, binoculars raised. “Gatesgarth hound trail. They’ve just slipped them off their leads.”
Twenty trailhounds, similar to foxhounds but bred for speed and hooked on scenting aniseed, stream across the hillside. They bounce over the sieves (as rushes are known here), noses to the ground.
“Drive up Honister,” says Willie, “and take your photos before they contour around Fleetwith and Haystacks and race hell for leather back to the finish near here.”
Further up the pass a man with a red flag stops traffic to allow the hounds across the road, in hot pursuit of the whiff of aniseed oil that had been laid for them.
“Hey!” yells a van driver, pointing accusingly, as sheep scatter on seeing the dogs. “Hey, nothing,” retorts the flag man. “That’s not sheep worrying. Those ‘sheep’ are hoggs, just 12 months old. Only big lambs, really, and easily spooked. They ken hound trailing’s a game. If a trailhound touches any sheep, a vet puts it down.”
As the dogs pass below the white cross commemorating young Fanny Mercer who accidentally fell to her death here in 1887, I spare a thought too for fledgling ravens slaughtered by sparrowhawks.
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