Isolated Showers

An away day this weekend, we yomped off on to the moors to help plant thousands of cotton grass plants

on the Kinder plateau;  Joe, Tom and I were joined by a friend and her son ‘the young man’ who is only five.

The forecast was for ‘isolated showers’. I think the showers decided they needed ‘to get out more’ and had found each other on some sort of  Internet ‘metrological forum’  and decide to meet up for the day, on Kinder Scout: we were on the hills for five hours, it rained persistently for four of them!

It was my plan to show you lots of arty shots of cotton grass planting, but it was just too wet for anything more than a couple of grab shots, and they are of poor quality, sorry; but on with the story

Kinder Scout, is important  both historically and environmentally, in 1932 it was the location for a protest march, that paved the way for the public rights to access to areas of open country; a report from the Manchester Guardian newspaper, dated April 24th 1932

‘Four or five hundred ramblers, mostly from Manchester, trespassed in mass on Kinder Scout to-day. They fought a brief but vigorous hand-to-hand struggle with a number of keepers specially enrolled for the occasion. This they won with ease, and then marched to Ashop Head, where they held a meeting before returning in triumph to Hayfield. Their triumph was short-lived, for there the police met them, halted them, combed their ranks for suspects, and detained five men. Another man had been detained earlier in the day.’

Environmentally, the area has taken a hammering

‘As the environmental pressure on the area has grown over the last 200 years – due to a combination of acid rain, major wildfires and past excessive grazing – the peat soil has become so degraded that, instead of reducing carbon in the air, it is actively releasing it back into the atmosphere.’ 

 

It is a wild landscape, deep black peat, that shakes like a jelly if you jump up and down on it

The cotton grass planting is a National Trust project, to stabilise the area, despite the weather more volunteers had turned out than expected; many hands make light work, so  when we made it up there they had just planted the last plant not 5 mins before. This could have be akin to telling ‘the young man’ on Christmas eve, that Santa was make believe! It was a long walk for one so young, his mum coaxed the National Trust Wardens in to digging a couple of plants back up again, so that he could plant his all important cotton plant.

(Cotton grass on a sunnier day!)

Tom and Joe just had to take the disappointment on their rain drenched chins. 

As made our way home the National Trust wardens, who were no doubt glad to get off the hill and out of the rain earlier than expected, bumped  past us down the track.

The weather and the planting didn’t turn out quite how we expected but the day was something of an adventure.