Shades of Tolkien in a Northumbrian mire

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/27/shades-tolkien-northumbrian-mire-country-diary

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The area south of Hexham known as the Shire is an undulating landscape of fields and woods threaded by minor roads. It has a homely quality, a hint of Tolkien’s Shire. Among its small settlements is Whitley Chapel, where the church of St Helen squats on the knoll of Chapel Hill.

In the 17th century the Society of Friends held their meetings on Chapel Hill and the boggy area below it was known as Quakers’ Hollow, now Quakers’ Hole. Two farms border this semi-natural wetland, Moss House and Mire House, their names speaking of the terrain, ”moss” being a Northumbrian word for a bog.

Water drains from surrounding sandy banks into a peaty bowl where it is held by underlying clay, an example of a soligenous mire. The cup of the land is edged by fruiting trees on one side – elder, rose, holly, hawthorn, with thickets of honeysuckle and bramble – and willows on the other. Its nine hectares became a community project in 2003. There’s a bird hide and the willows are harvested for basket-making.

I walk slowly, examining the ditches for dragonflies. A common darter is a restless blur of wings, its orange-red abdomen a colour match for the rust-coloured water. Warmth lifts the seeds from tall wands of rosebay willowherb. Thistle heads expand like burst pillows. The air is full of down that blows towards a pasture where belted Galloway cows tug at the grass.

As I pass some stinging nettles, I notice one encased in a fine net. It’s watched over by a nursery web spider, Pisaura mirabilis, her two front pairs of legs stretched out in front. She is soft grey with a pale stripe running down her head.

After mating, this spider carries her eggs, swaddled in a silk cocoon, between her fangs for about two weeks. Then, just as they are about to hatch, she deposits the egg sac on a leaf, spinning a protective web around it to house her clustered spiderlings. Here they can moult with some degree of safety before dispersing into the grassy world of the mire.

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