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I'm a sucker for a good fingerpost and this one was all the better for being unknown to me until I stumbled across it while on a walk out from Cononley today. Indeed, had I not detoured away from a field full of frisky bullocks it would have remained a mystery to me still.

Displaying the classic Yorkshire West Riding finial, complete with six figure grid reference which is as valid today as the day it was fabricated, you know where you are at when you arrive in Glusburn. Except that these days Glusburn is in Craven, North Yorkshire. View the close up in the other place to see how the wooden fingers are secured into the iron post. 

I was taking a circuit through another set of "missing squares" for the butterfly survey, walking up and out of Airedale from Cononley to Glusburn where I descended to the bridge over Holme Beck (is there a name for the side valley that the A6068 travels through up to the Pennine watershed?) before climbing back over Glusborn Moor and along the side of Gib before dropping back down into Cononley. These are not well trodden paths, and there were a couple of places where rights of way on the map were not validated by signs on the ground, and I generally lack the courage to wander through people's yards and gardens so I made a few more detours and back tracks. That and the field which had been rented out to trail bikes which were zipping backward and forward at pace, even more vigorously than the bullocks.

I passed Cononley Lead Mines along the way (extra) but didn't realise you could go in and investigate, so I'll have to save that for another visit.

All told I gathered records for eight missing squares. The bulk were Meadow Brown and Ringlet,  but there were also a few Red Admiral, Small Tortoiseshell, Small Skipper, Comma, Speckled Wood and Large and Small White. Much of the walk was through improved pasture which is pretty sterile apart from field edges, but in one awkward corner of a field which was defying mechanisation there was a fine meadow which was alive with butterflies and moths - more in 50 square metres than I saw on the rest of the walk. 

I did find one more similarly special spot when I got back down into Cononley as I had a while to wait for my train. Noticing a right of way out of the top of the village with the promising destination of Quarry (dis) I walked up into another lepidoptera  oasis.