Saturday 27th May 2023

The big day.

I was awake at half four, no idea why, so I lay in bed till 5, then get up, get dressed and decide to head to the meeting point.

I was up here on a guided tour of rare orchids and a photography workshop. For me it was mostly about the rare orchids, rare and tiny orchids.

More of that later.

I pack and do one last check of the room and walk to reception to hand the room key in, load the car and set the destination in the sat nav.

Up one junction of the motorway, then into the Southern Lakes, with the roads empty of traffic, which would be very different in three hours time when we would be going the other way.

Into the hills, and up ever-narrowing lanes, through a small village and then up a narrow dead end lane to the meeting point, a spot so remote that there were two vehicles in it already.

I park, switch off the engine and wait.

My guide emerges from the parked car beside me after half an hour, he had kipped here after arriving in the wee small hours.

We head off into the bog, along a boardwalk and begin the hunt for our first target species: Coralroot orchids.

All three of the orchids this first day were to be either small, or tiny, or even tinier.

This was going to be a challenge.

After half an hour, I find the first spike, and then ten minutes later, a second. We both talk lots of shots, but with the clock ticking and the day progressing, we start to walk back to the car.

Something catches my eye, clearly an orchid spike, but a giant compared to the others we had seen. A Coralroot some four inches tall, and in perfect condition, and with two small plants beside it.

We take hundreds more shots.

And that was that. We walk back to the car, and on the way we encounter a nice retired lady, who was a rabid Corbynite, who would hear nothing bad about him. Well, she did hear because I said I had had enough of people on the left who preferred to be right on rather than in power.

We reach the car and drive on to the next site. About 50 minutes away, back under the motorway and up into the hills again, along narrow lanes until we reached a long straight road. We park and look at the fields in front of us.

We walked into the first field, lapwing chicks scattered well before we approached, and they hid so we couldn't see them. While their parents wheeled and squawked high above us.

We climbed over a dry stone wall, then into a moor of densely packed heather, to a geotagged point, at which point we started to look.

And after some half an hour, my guide found two tiny plants, barely two inches high, like dried red grass. This was the Lesser Twayblade.

We only found these two plants, so I take shots and we move on, an hour to the final site, but on the way there was lunch to think about.

We find a pub on a bend in the road, it did the important things: beer and food. We have a sharing platter and a pint, then sit to watch the motorbikes scream past.

We suffer an IT failure, and have to recharge a phone with the location of the final orchid, so we have a coffee and teacake.

Half an hour later we were on the move again, heading to a lane, before turning up a track to an unmarked site.

After parking, there is a fell, and at the bottom, mounds where top soil maybe had slipped down. On one of these we hoped we would find the orchids.

After searching we find about 8 spikes, none open, but one close, so I record that, and by then it was six, and time to go to the hotel.

It was an hour's drive off the fells back down to the coast at Barrow. Traffic was slow, we got stuck behind tractors, but in the end we pulled into the familiar town. At least to me.

My hotel was in Walney, over the bridge, and after which one of our windfarms was named. The hotel was a former church, built 100 years before, and very nicely converted.

I checked in, and was too tired to walk to the local shop for supper, so had a brew and ate the two pack of biscuits before reviewing my shots and going to bed as dusk fell.

Phew, rock and roll.