A skylark rose from among the dry grasses and heather beside the footpath, spiralling higher and higher, showering us with song until it was lost from view in an almost cloudless sky.
In dozens of visits here on May mornings over the past 40 years this was the most perfect day we could recall: still air, warm sunshine and crystal-clear visibility. Bitterly cold wind is expected and horizontal sleet not uncommon at this time of year in one of the last places that spring reaches in the north Pennines.
Cerulean blue trumpets of spring gentians, Gentiana verna, nestling among grasses that have made barely an inch of new growth, draw botanists to this spot but this day we were distracted by the bird’s-eye primroses, Primula farinosa.
Their blooming coincides with another floral spectacle, the Chelsea flower show, but, in comparison with the show’s mollycoddled plants, these plants have an inimitable advantage: a vast treeless arena of undulating fells that stretches, unbroken, to the horizon in every direction. The contrast in scale between these tiny alpines and the bleak grandeur of their surroundings gives them their emotional impact. Cultivated in a pot or a flower border, they would be just another pretty flower; they belong on these fells, among plaintive, mournful calls of redshank and golden plover.
Their vivid pink flowers are held aloft on slender stalks rising from mealy green-green leaf rosettes no larger than a thumbnail. Lower down the valley they grow 10cm tall but many here are barely half that, stunted by extreme climate and starved of minerals in soils leached by rain. Some cling to a veneer of turf over gravelly, crystalline marble fragments of sugar limestone, formed when the volcanic heat of molten dolerite baked the calcareous crust 295m years ago. These tenacious flowers survive in a landscape forged by fire, ice, wind and water.
The wonder is that flowers of such deceptively frail beauty endure in these tundra-like surroundings, where ankle high, wind pruned heather often provides the only shelter. That they do, and unfailingly reappear every year when winter finally relaxes its grip, is cause for exaltation. Today’s skylark provided the perfect accompaniment.
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