Tramping up the rough and tumble of ancient pastures on the way to Steps Farm, high above the lush greens of the upper Manifold valley, I came to the set of meadows which only a couple of weeks ago were ablaze with a hundred species of wild flowers. The insects were then hard at work, the air was sweet with the aroma of a dozen different sorts of nectar. But now the date allowing mowing of these protected places has passed and the fields are smooth, and we can make short-cuts from stile to stile across the shorn stems. The headlands, though, are a different matter for they still form burgeoning banks of blossom ? hogweed, vetch and newly opened harebells.
On an August afternoon such as this it was good to see half a hundred cloud islets floating lazily above the green reef knolls of those famous hills overlooking the upper valley of the Dove. There were Hitter Hill, Chrome Hill, Parkhouse Hill poking the sky, a pleasant frieze upon the north-eastern horizon as I looked across from above Steps Farm. The eaves of ruined Hayeshead Farm were a happy hunting ground of a dozen swallows, snapping up an airborne snack under the dark foliage of a few sentinel sycamores. In happier times this handful of bent trees helped deflect the gales off Revidge and beyond; nowadays that task is finished because the Hayeshead roof has gone. No one sits by the Yorkshire range on stormy nights, no oil lamp flickers in the window to guide approaching travellers from off the boggy moor.
Though this isn't really true bilberry country (as are the Langsett Moors away towards the north of the national park), there are colonies growing among the tangle of heather high on Revidge but their season is just about spent for another year.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/15/country-diary-staffordshire-moorlands
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