Building Up

With mild weather dominating it's best to take the opportunity to get plenty of food inside you before the colder stuff comes along. The stag was not going to be easily distracted from his feeding although the smaller hind prefers to know what's going on.

Watery

It was generous of the sun to show up at all this morning, so no complaints about the watery picture.

Looking down at where there used to be paths heather seeds are trying to colonise.

It was at this spot more than year ago that SWT scattered some heather seeds which quickly disappeared from the scene when their cattle decided to spend a lot of their time here. Things have not recovered since and the current period of wet weather leads us to wonder what it would have looked like if the cattle had been on the moor this year.

Round The Bend

The Piper House access gate to Blacka is situated on a bend in the Hathersage Road where there has been extensive highways work going on in the last few weeks.

Since a tragic accident last year when two young women were killed we have expected work to be carried out at this spot. There was a lot of dicussion on the dangers of that bend at the time. Regularly over many years cars have gone into the wall when drivers have misjudged the bend often at speed. Now the highways people have gone away and we can see what they have done.

Well the first thing that should be said is that they've spent a lot of money. But has it been spent on something that will make the bend safer? A lot of the work has been devoted to rebuilding the stone wall. The road has been resurfaced and the largish parking space opposite Blacka has been sealed off. Nothing has been done to realign the bend, no new speed restriction either mandatory or advisory is in evidence and nothing has been done to compensate for the access restrictions caused by the parking space being closed.

So what exactly has been the point? We now have a smart new wall, a new road surface and a line of reflecting posts on the footpath. Traffic will certainly revert to travelling at some speed after a period of calmness while the roadwork was going on. SWT's gate access to Blacka at this point has now been made unusable by the line of the new wall and very few people are likely to try to enter Blacka here in future.

You wonder sometimes. Does anybody actualy think before starting these projects?

Deserted

The pastures are not completely empty as the cattle, once intended for the moorland, remain. But sheep have been removed and so far I've seen none that have been left behind. This contrasts with earlier in the year when sheep were removed during lambing but four were left behind to fend as best they could.

I struggle to understand the practices of sheep farming. Very little sense of duty of protection is observable in those responsible for sheep these days. Not in the case of hill sheep at any rate. We have sheep regularly all over a fast main road alongside Blacka. Last week on BBC Radio 4's Farming programme there were complaints being made about the increase in rural crime which include stealing sheep. A farmer who, from his voice, sounded a very reasonable and educated man said that he found he was 200 or so sheep missing when he came to collect them to take to market. This amounted to ten per cent of the herd. They could have been taken weeks previously, but he couldn't be sure because he obviously didn't inspect them regularly.

Yet if your dog suddenly and unpredictably runs after a sheep the farmer will feel quite in his rights to shoot the dog; and there are many instances of this happening. The worst at this are usually those who are poorest at looking after their own animals.

Westward Ho!

Or 'caw' perhaps. But the corvine commuters going west in the early morning are mostly jackdaws from the noise they make. Rooks are with them but are quieter. Other daily migrations not far from here have more rooks in them and they travel more northerly.



Not all have good lane discipline.

Night and Day

The usual group of one old stag and two hinds were out in the early morning. These days night vision is needed.

In the afternoon they may or may not have been in the party of ten or more spread out over the heather and birch fringes on the northern section of the moor.

by the time we had reached the spot they had moved off down the hill, tops just visible.
..... though not every similar twiggy growth is a stag...

Squelch

Rarely do the paths get as utterly soggy as they are now, even on Blacka Hill. What they would be like if the cattle had been on the moor doesn't bear thinking about. As it is the main routes have still not recovered from the cattle being here last year. The problem is that they use paths unlike the deer who tend to keep to the heather, and several of the paths were seriously widened in 2007 and will take some years to get back to normal.

The cattle are meanwhile still in the pasture land. Not having seen them during the mist and gloom of recent mornings we had wondered if they had been removed. The reason for them being there is hard to understand as neither conservation nor recreation targets are being met by their presence. Sheep could not be seen today - they could have been all lying down in a sheltered hollow, or they could have been taken off for the fat lamb sales.

A walk through the pasture revealed many fungi still there. Verdigris Mushroom were plentiful as were the edible Meadow Waxcaps....







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and others unidentified.