Mother Shipton on Rosy Garlic

A long and tiring trip down to Kent for a days fieldwork, made somewhat more traumatic by the car developing an engine fault and forcing me to stop abruptly on the side of a dual carriageway without a hard shoulder. Fortunately, because we were in a dangerous location, the response from the AA was incredibly swift, and we were towed to a garage where the engineer scanned the engine, finding numerous fault codes but nothing actually substantially amiss. He followed me to the site and I drove round all day with no problem.

This very large site has a lot of rather indifferent grassland, but every now and then there's an area of higher interest. I was pleased to find a patch of Rosy Garlic, a Mediterranean species now established along much of the south coast and spreading elsewhere in the UK. It was proving irresistible to this fresh Mother Shipton moth - named because the pattern on the wing looks rather like an old lady with a hooked nose, supposedly similar to Old Mother Shipton, a 16th century Yorkshire witch.

I was a little nervous about the journey home, but it went smoothly until I reached a roundabout about a mile from home, when the warning message re-appeared. This time it didn't force me to stop and we got back OK. When I switched the engine off and on again the warning disappeared I have the feeling that there's a software fault somewhere...