The old railway station in this part of Derbyshire’s Wye valley presents an astonishing happenstance of mixed colour. There is the Van Gogh yellow of the ragwort and the dark mullein spikes. There are the blended lilacs of field scabious and the rose shades from wild marjoram and over most of the area towers a canopy of greater and black knapweed flowers creating a galaxy of tiny purple globes. In the wind, all these colours sway and mingle.
My favourite of all is in the blooms of the bloody cranesbill. It is intriguing that botanists used body parts to invoke its hue while the makers of matte lipstick call the same shade “pink peony”. Look closely at the petals and they comprise fields of exquisite magenta veined with red.
Yet what I take from the whole of this old industrial relic is the sense of composed summer riot. If there is a finer or more formally arranged display of wildflowers in Britain, then I’ve never seen it.
It is affecting therefore to reflect upon their origins and location, because the flowerbeds occupy the exact length of the old platforms. In fact, some of the flowers are creeping along the cracks to the bevelled pavement edge that would once have borne Victorian feet as they stepped down from the train carriages. These wildflowers stand where the milk churns would have waited for the London night train, so that Derbyshire’s creamiest milk could be on the breakfast tables of the capital.
John Ruskin hated this railway and all its “close clinging damnation”. He thought it had driven Apollo and the muses from an English version of the Vale of Tempe. But environmental prophets can get things very wrong. It may have been an eyesore in the 1860s, and even for a century thereafter, but the trees and wildflowers slowly worked their healing magic. Millers Dale station and the old quarry only 200m along the trail, which is equally flower-rich and beautiful, are as good examples I know of how nature can restore even the most blasted of human works.
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