Skirr Cottage Journal.

Welcome to the Skirr Cottage Journal.

This is the first of what I hope will become a regular nature diary feature. The ‘rural rides’ will take in the local area around my home and other locations in the Peak. I can never hope to reach the dizzy literate heights of my namesake Kenneth ‘Allsop’, but I will follow tentatively in his shadow and in awe of his great insight into nature and the countryside:

“In the short term, man seems to have it taped, to have gained dominance over the planet; in the longer term I think we may be the losers … Because central Government and local authorities betray the trust vested in them. Because landowners agree to it.

“Money talks. Beauty is voiceless…”

              Kenneth Allsop. In The Country. 1972.

  

  

  We moved into our new home - a cottage on the out-skirts of Buxton - on the 8th March 1996. Moving house is of course a traumatic experience for anyone, and we were no exception to the rule. The garden of course proved invaluable to us all, it being the main factor in 'pulling up stumps' in the first place. Being lovers of the local area and all ‘wild places’, we had longed to create a wildlife garden which help in some small way to preserve the wild creatures and the environmental biodiversity of the area.

        We soon greeted the silence: it is so quiet and peaceful here and at night and it goes quite 'dark', something that came as a surprise.  We then had to get used to the cottage's 'whims'; it creaks rather like an old galleon at sea. Such bumps and stirrings seemed to be amplified by the lack of heavy traffic noise, such as we were bombarded with before. The cottage is far from remote being on a long road full of other fare more modern dwellings built sporadically around the 1930’s and 40’s. The semi-detached cottage we inhabit was built around 1850 as far as we can determine, and was possibly a forest workers cottage built by the Chatsworth Estate.

     The garden wall borders on to open pasture (the back field), while a little to the west, stark trees line the high edge of Burbage Moor, an area known to us merely as the Edge. Here we now are, for better or worse - on the edge of the wild. We have been privileged to observe certain animals that are personal totems in my Celtic imaginings - hares in the backfield and up on the Edge. Sometimes we watch spellbound as one of the beautiful creatures creeps right up under our garden wall. They seem to me to be so primeval and one of the reasons why I spend so much of my time watching and studying them.