{"id":2017,"date":"2020-06-11T11:08:44","date_gmt":"2020-06-11T10:08:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/?p=2017"},"modified":"2020-06-23T16:10:48","modified_gmt":"2020-06-23T15:10:48","slug":"armchair-walker-6-the-crayfish-of-ironmasters-vale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/?p=2017","title":{"rendered":"Armchair Walker #6 – The Crayfish of Ironmaster\u2019s Vale"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nThe woods are full of secrets, and it\u2019s taken Lockdown to give me eyes to see them. If it hadn\u2019t been for these remarkable times and their constraints, I don\u2019t suppose I would ever have taken such a close look at the map, day after day, to spy out these tangled webs of purely local walks. What a delight it has been to focus in on a knoll or cleft or patchwork of fields, and realise that my own countryside is still a mystery and an enticement.<\/p>\n

Ironmaster\u2019s Vale runs east\/west, a very twisty and narrow stream hollow that\u2019s not quite a gorge, and not a valley either. Sunk in here among the trees are the ruins of an iron-grinding industry \u2013 arches, walls, spillways, sluices and old rotten beams thick with ferns. Limekilns and millstones, caves and quarries. <\/p>\n

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A footpath meanders through the vale, with side turnings leading off through the nettles and butterbur. The narrowest and least noticeable of these unofficial trails leads to a most remarkable quarry wall, a concave sweep of grey carboniferous limestone about 350 million years old canted at a steep angle, with a cap of buttery yellow oolitic limestone lying horizontally on top where it was deposited about 180 million years ago. A geologist\u2019s thrill, and a questioning mind\u2019s delight.<\/p>\n

Two boys were dipping for crayfish in the stream. They had caught one apiece, lobster-like creatures about five inches long that scuttled round the bottom of their bucket. These white-clawed crayfish, natives of Britain, are threatened by an invasion of American signal crayfish, which are bigger and tougher. The newcomers also carry a plague to which our chaps have no resistance. <\/p>\n

So crayfish have their worries, too.
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The woods are full of secrets, and it\u2019s taken Lockdown to give me eyes to see them. If it hadn\u2019t been for these remarkable times and their constraints, I don\u2019t suppose I would ever have taken such a close look at the map, day after day, to spy out these tangled webs of purely local […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-armchair-walker","category-7-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}