Where are all the Yorkshire Dales’ butterflies? - Roger Ratcliffe

This should not happen. On previous hot summer days, this stretch of the long-distance trail to Kettlewell I remember being pretty close to butterfly heaven.

But where were the common blues flitting across the path that runs over a sheep pasture known as Lea Green, their wings glittering in the sun as they moved from one bird’s-foot trefoil to another?

Where were those green-veined whites so often seen further on? Or the small heaths, the wall butterflies, or any number of day-flying moths usually found feeding on the path’s copious growths of lady’s bedstraw?

On this part of my trek along the 80-mile route from Ilkley to the shore of Windermere I was able to count on one hand the number of small whites and small tortoiseshells I encountered, but nothing else.

As it happens, my walk coincided with the final week of the wildlife charity Butterfly Conservation’s annual Big Butterfly Count, and it turned out that my experience in this part of the Yorkshire Dales replicated the picture that was emerging elsewhere in the UK.

According to the charity, the absence of butterflies is a consequence of this year’s abnormally wet and windy spring and below-average temperatures in early summer.

There were few birds too barring the ubiquitous, scavenging carrion crows. Just as it’s said that ravens leaving the Tower of London would have fateful portends for Britain, I would seriously fear for the Dales if Corvus corone were to disappear from this landscape.

Not much chance of that at moment, though, and between the flights of swifts which screamed round the rooftops of Grassington and again at Kettlewell, I saw plenty of carrion crows.

The only other birds encountered were a few meadow pipits, one of them a fledgling which rose unsteadily from tussocks on what looked like its fearful maiden flight and immediately fluttered back to earth.

Several fellow Dales Way-ers were encountered, one of them a man who told me he recently walked the mostly flat 84-mile Norfolk Coastal Path and had found himself craving more of a challenge of up hill and down dale. He pressed on ahead and soon vanished into the distance.

Another walker of the trail, a young lady carrying a humongous backpack, had begun at Bowness-on-Windermere and said the route wasn’t very interesting until she crossed the M6 motorway at Lambrigg and entered the Yorkshire Dales.

The path through Langstrothdale into Upper Wharfedale had been the highlight, she added.

Her words were music to my ears. My objective today was Buckden, but beyond the village those delectable hay meadows of Langstrothdale and picturesque banks of the infant River Wharfe lay ahead.