Hills And Holes

Funny title for a blogpost; funny name for a nature reserve. But here we are at Barnack Hills And Holes National Nature Reserve, in the very north-west corner of Cambridgeshire.

This was actually our main reason for visiting the Barnack area and we spent the morning wandering through this strange landscape, before we looked at the village and church.

I had a mental list of what I hoped to see - it didn't work out like that, of course, some things I found, some things I missed out on and, most interestingly, some photos of quite everyday things, like these Dog Roses, reminded me of just how wonderful they were.

If you hadn't already guessed, the hills and holes are what were left behind after the Barnack Rag building stone had been removed. The choppy undulations were too bumpy to plough and, with heaps of quarrying waste spread around, not very fertile. You might graze a few sheep, I suppose. Leave it alone for a few centuries and it's the perfect place for wild flowers.

Some birds like it too, like this dapper male Yellowhammer. When I worked on the farm, in the 60s and 70s, there were flocks of them hanging around our grain silos, though even then there were fewer of them each year.

Bird's Foot Trefoil is a common enough plant. It has some interesting names; "eggs and bacon" from its yellow flowers and red-brown buds, or, less appetisingly, "Granny's toenails" from the shape of the seed pods.

There are some attractive birch trees scattered around. Quarrying was being carried out here at least from Roman times, maybe earlier.

Lots of butterflies were promised but all we could find were a couple of very skittish blues, the odd Meadow Brown and many Small Heath butterflies, like the one above. They belong to that annoying bunch who always settle with wings closed, hiding the more colourful orange top surface.

We found several of these strange plants. Broomrapes have no chlorophyll of their own and parasitise the roots of other plants for their nourishment.

The most beauteous, and numerous, of the orchids were the Chalk Fragrant Orchids, which not only look pretty but give off a pleasant scent.

Although the stone was used for local houses, barns and walls, the main customers for the best building stone were the great medieval abbeys of the area. Barnack is only a short distance from the rivers Nene and Welland and from there the stone could be transported via the Fenland waterways.

Above is the tallest Man Orchid I've ever seen. Its rarity makes up for its lack of spectacular colour.

If you get down and look closely there is a little bit of colour and you can imagine that each individual flower looks like a tiny figure with a big head and puny arms and legs. 

The pale lemon flowers of Mouse-Eared Hawkweed growing amongst the Bird's Foot Trefoil.

A Common Blue Damselfly added a spark of electric blue to the greenery.

And the Dog Roses looked even more stunning when lit from behind.

Most of the best building stone was extracted by the late fifteenth century, though it's been recycled since as buildings have been demolished, and inferior stuff has been quarried for roadstone. Perhaps we'd better finish off with one of my old photos to remind us of the magnificent buildings that came about as a result of all this digging and delving. Here's the soaring form of Ely Cathedral, built almost entirely of Barnack stone....

Take care.