I set off this morning for a short walk in the forestry but found myself increasingly drawn upwards along a little-used track which joins a trackway which is part of an ancient drove road. We've never managed to reach the drove road, and each time I walk this way I find I have to stop at an earlier and earlier point, so I probably never will.
The area the track rises through is dense with gorse, most of which stopped flowering some weeks ago - but gorse flowers always surprise: there were just a few bushes which were coming IN to flower, bushes which will now go on flowering all the way through winter.
I may have no hope of reaching the drove road but one bonus of persevering up this track is that the view becomes increasingly good, even if it is across a foreground of.... gorse.
This is the point, 145m above sea level, where I stopped, the moorland I would have loved to have reached being still half a mile away on a steeply rising track. In these circumstances, turning back seems an admission of defeat but I was immediately cheered up, the gorse presenting me with....
....a beautiful little dragonfly, almost certainly a female black darter.
She was almost comatose - unsurprising, since the temperature wasn't much above 12C, the sun was hidden behind high stratus, and the gorse needles were still damp with last night's dew.
I hope she survives the winter as it hasn't, as far as we're concerned, been a good year for dragonflies.
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