On one side of the high moor there is an escarpment falling steeply westwards into the vale. The edge is wooded with gnarled oak trees and birches, their roots penetrating fissures in the hard outcropping rock that was once quarried when this was an industrial landscape. It’s easy to forget how busy it was here at one time. Walls of the old blacksmith’s workshop are now stubs covered in moss, and the cliffs that once rang with hammers are silent. 

To the east the moor dips down to a lake and then rolls up again and on as far as the eye can see. It’s russet brown at this time of year. In summer it will be green bracken and purple heather. There is a road between the high moor and lake that is surprisingly busy given how remote the moor feels when shrouded in mist, or when wind and rain whips across the open hills. On a sunny day at the weekend the carpark and verges are crammed with cars. There are visitors who come to walk their dogs on the path around the lake, or perhaps stride out over the moor. At night the road is used by those who want to have a drink or meal in the village pubs and keep away from the main road on their way home.

There was some surprisingly warm weather in February and that caused the moor to shake off winter and come alive. The animals responding to the seasonal urge to procreate. The sheep are lambing; the hardy Blue Grey cattle are calving; and as evening and night gathers, toads, frogs and newts migrate down off the high moor to the lake to spawn. The urgent and powerful seasonal life forces remind me of Dylan Thomas’s poem “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees”.

However, there is a modern problem. The toads and newts have to cross the road that lies between their home on the moor and their spawning place in the lake. The male toads will sit on the road waiting for the females to cross, I guess because it’s a good place to meet. A lot of them get squashed by traffic. In an effort to reduce the carnage a group of people from the village go up to the moor every night and patrol the road with headlamps and buckets catching the amphibians before they fall prey to cars, carrying them over the road and popping them into the lake. It’s heart-warming that humans will make this sort of effort to help another species.

The annual toad migration happens all over the country and attracts quite a bit of media attention. There was an article in the Guardian about a toad patrol in West Sussex and if you are an insomniac Radio 3 listener like me then you might have heard the special edition of Friday’s ‘Late Junction’ in which “Jennifer Lucy Allan shares an amphibious-inspired selection of adventurous sounds, from newt dub and toad rock to ambient axolotls, plus plenty of froggy field recordings.”

Has anyone else been looking out for the spring spawning and annual amphibian migration?

Country diary: We’re out on toad patrol with bucket and torch

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/23/country-diary-were-out-on-toad-patrol-with-bucket-and-torch

Newt Junction

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001lc4l

Rowan on the moor

A Moodscope member